U.S. V. STEWART, PART II.(The Talk of the Town)(the trial of Lynne Stewart takes place in same courtroom where Martha Stewart's trial took place)

By last week, all signs of Martha Stewart's legal ordeal--the TV cameras, the lines of spectators, and the bottles of Japanese herbal tea that Stewart and her legal team sipped at the defense table--had vanished from the federal courthouse downtown. But Courtroom 110 still had a celebrity trial and a defendant named Stewart, although this one's name might as well be followed by the words "no relation at all."

In the courthouse's dim marble corridors, Lynne Stewart's celebrity status may even outrank Martha's. For two decades, she has been one of the most recognizable criminal-defense lawyers in town, known both for her causes (mostly of the left) and for her appearance (a rounded frame of not quite five feet that is usually covered in a floral-print housedress). "I'm not exactly in Martha's social stratum, and, if anyone wants to know where I got my handbag, it's a Canal Street knockoff," Stewart said in her jolly growl one day last week. "But I do love Martha's housewares. I use them all the time. And my son met his wife on a trip to Nicaragua during the Sandinista days. She's now Marta Stewart."

Lynne Stewart looked quite chipper for someone facing the prospect of four decades in prison. In the mid-nineties, Stewart took on as a client Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who was charged with conspiring with his followers to bomb various places in New York City, including bridges, tunnels, and the United Nations. After a year-long trial, the Sheikh was convicted, but Stewart continued to represent him during his appeals. In May, 2000, in a meeting with Stewart at a federal prison in Minnesota, Abdel Rahman dictated a statement to an Arabic translator calling for an end to the ceasefire between his radical-Islamist organization and the Egyptian government; Stewart, in turn, called reporters to confirm Abdel Rahman's desire to see the ceasefire terminated. (Stewart disputes this description of the Sheikh's statement.) As a result of these events, Stewart, along with the translator and a paralegal, was charged with conspiring to assist terrorists. The trial is expected to last into the fall.

The case raises profound questions about the intersection of the right to counsel and the security of the public, but few of those issues were on display last week, when the evidence consisted mostly of the droning recitation of transcripts and news clippings. In a ...