COMEBACK.

The annual luncheon of the New York Council of Defense Lawyers is usually an amiable schmoozefest over chicken cutlets. But at the event the other day, at the Grand Hyatt, the introduction of this year's guest speaker reduced the group of notoriously voluble attorneys to a respectful silence. Just about everyone in the room had heard of Anthony G. Amsterdam, but few had ever seen him in the flesh. There before them was the legal world's Thomas Pynchon.

Amsterdam had once been among the most famous lawyers in the country. In 1972, as a thirty-six-year-old professor at Stanford Law School, he argued and won one of the most important cases in the history of the Supreme Court. In Furman v. Georgia, the Justices struck down all of the death-penalty statutes then in effect, halting executions in the United States. Amsterdam's achievement is widely believed to rank with Thurgood Marshall's triumphs in school desegregation, even though four years later Amsterdam lost Gregg v. Georgia, which allowed states to pass death-penalty statutes again. On other key issues, such as freedom of speech, there was no more visible champion than Amsterdam.

Then, in 1981, Amsterdam moved to New York University, and his public appearances, if not his legend, dwindled. "When N.Y.U. announced he was coming from Stanford, it was like when the Mets got Pedro Martinez, because he was a superstar," Paul B. Bergman, the president of the council, said. "And since then he's become this ethereal presence." In a rare departure, Amsterdam accepted the invitation of the council to present an award to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld--the founders of the Innocence Project, which uses DNA technology to free wrongfully convicted prisoners--who are as ubiquitous as Amsterdam is reclusive.

Now seventy-one, Amsterdam is thin and wizened--he didn't touch his lunch--and his face is dominated by a bushy mustache and large plastic eyeglasses. He looks like a vaudevillian. Amsterdam isn't the kind of speaker who loosens up the crowd with a few jokes. "I am not talking about individual judges," he said. "I am talking about something more systemic and radical. We have witnessed a subversion of the very idea that criminal defendants have rights. The blindfold that Justice ...