I'm Anna Garcia with True Crime News, the podcast. Every crime tells a story. Every story demands justice.

True Crime News, the podcast, covers breaking crimes, investigating high profile and under the radar cases.

Every week, we dive beyond the headlines, exploring the effects of violent crimes on victims and search for justice.

We hope you join us as your weekly source for

true crime news. Listen to and follow True Crime News the podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you

get your podcasts. Many towns and cities in this country have their well-known defense

attorneys. You might see them on the 10 o'clock news, talking to

the press on the courthouse steps, or maybe you've seen them in true-crime documentaries.

They tend to be quasi-public figures in a way that most attorneys are not.

Pat Fanning is one of those attorneys. He spent nine years as a state and federal prosecutor in New Orleans, and he was known as a fierce advocate for the government.

So when he left the prosecutor's office to become a defense attorney in 1983, some people were surprised.

They struggled to understand how, after a career spent locking criminals up, Pat could dedicate himself to defending them instead.

But Pat sees things differently.

I think when I was a prosecutor, people thought I was a pretty hard right, lock them

all up and throw away the key kind of prosecutor.

And then when I became a defense attorney, people thought that I was a guy who really wanted

to fight with the government and get in their face and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I think that when a lawyer is an

aggressive lawyer and tries hard to do the best job he can for his side, people make the mistake

of thinking, well, he's very pro prosecution or he's very pro defense. He's very pro his client,

whoever he's fighting for.

By the mid-90s, Pat had spent more than a decade doing criminal defense work.

He'd represented some tough characters, like Gerald Elwood, a notorious drug gang enforcer, who drove an armor-plated pickup truck with the word homicide stenciled on the windshield.

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