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Andrea Lyon, now the director of the DePaul Center for Justice in Capital Cases, was assisting Coventry and Kunz in the case in 1982, when she was a member of the public defender's Homicide Task Force. She said she, too, knew about Wilson's confession and kept it secret. She was the lawyer who notarized the affidavit.

"It's personally very uncomfortable," Lyon said. "You have to say to yourself, `In order for the system to work, people have to have loyalty to their client and for that loyalty to be 100 percent. Most of the time that's not hard; sometimes it is. The point of being someone's advocate is that you're their advocate even when the case is very hard, not just when it's easy." Creative ways to resolution While the facts of every case are unique, there are times when a lawyer can accomplish what she feels is important while remaining true to the rules of the profession, said Mary T. Robinson, former administrator for the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission and now an ethics and professional responsibility consultant.

"I think lawyers are silent heroes all the time. They find ways to do the right thing and honor the values that are inherent in the rules -- not just the rules," Robinson said.

Lyon described one example of a real-life scenario that involved a creative approach to dealing with a secret she felt compelled to do something about.

She once represented a battered woman who had been in an abusive relationship with a man she was charged with killing, when the client confided that the man had sexually abused her young daughter.

"She would not allow me to talk to her child about it, or refer the child for help. She said the shame was enough and she didn't want it public," Lyon said. "Every time I'd see that young girl I'd want to cry. I could see on her face the damage done to her -- all the domestic violence and being a victim -- but I couldn't talk to her about it because to talk to her about it would've been to reveal where I knew it from."

But Lyon said she found a way to help the girl without breaking the attorney-client confidence. She talked to the girl about the stress of her mother being in jail, telling her she knew of some counseling services where she could get some support -- just to deal with the stress of her mother's case.

"She thought about it and eventually said she'd like the number," Lyon said. "I sent her to a friend of mine, a therapist who deals in child abuse, who I knew would get her to talk about [the sex abuse].

"She was about 14 when this happened. By the time the case was over she was a senior in high school," Lyon said. "She ended up going to college on a track scholarship. She ended up getting better, which was pretty great."

Breen said he has firsthand experience in finding a way around a situation where a lawyer learns something that could set an innocent person free -- but it was at a time, he stressed, when a sense of trust existed between defense attorneys and prosecutors.

"If the defense bar and the prosecution bar will communicate in the interests of justice, there are probably ways around a situation," he said.

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