Cincinnati – Jennifer Kinsley says her professors in law school told her never to divulge it, but she set out to be an English teacher, not a lawyer.

But a field trip to a prison death row in North Carolina while in law school showed her that becoming a lawyer was no mistake.

Now, at 28, she already has been involved in a string of high-profile cases, including:

• Defending photographer Thomas Condon, who was convicted in April 2001 of abusing corpses at the Hamilton County morgue by manipulating bodies, placing props on them and photographing them.

• Filing a lawsuit last summer against the city of Cincinnati, charging the city had a pattern of violating the rights of homeless people.

• Citing a change in community standards as a defense for Hustler publisher Larry Flynt after his downtown store was raided and allegedly sexually explicit videos were seized last summer.

She said she considers law not only a profession but a calling.

“I feel really lucky to have the opportunities that I have had. None of my friends have the opportunities that come my way,” said Kinsley. “I can’t explain why it has happened but — I’ll help anybody that needs it. It’s something I feel called to do.”

Kinsley graduated from the University of Florida with a degree in English at age 20.

“But the thought of going into a high school classroom with 16- and 17-year-olds when I was 20 was something that was not going to work,” she said.

So she went to Duke University to study law, receiving her law degree in 1999.

“I went to law school with the idea of wanting to help people, but what direction that was going to take I didn’t really know,” she said.

“The second semester of my first year of law school I had a professor for criminal law class who was just awesome — hands down the best teacher I have ever had.

“He took us on a field trip to one of the prisons in North Carolina, and he did not tell us when we went there that it was the maximum security prison that housed death row.

“One of the first things we saw on the tour was the actual death chamber. That just made such an impact on me that I wasn’t expecting. Right then I knew criminal defense was something I really wanted to do.”

She came to Cincinnati after law school to join her husband, Dirk Commandeur, a Procter & Gamble marketing manager.

Initially, she worked for the Public Defender’s Office. Then in 2000, she answered a job ad at the downtown law firm of Sirkin Pinales Mezibov & Schwartz — Lou Sirkin’s firm.

About half her work at the firm is in criminal law, and half is in civil rights law, she said.

The Cincinnati homelessness case, part of which has been settled, has brought her the most satisfaction, she said.

“So much good has come out of that on all sides,” she said. “To see the impact that the law has had on the lives of people gives me strong motivation to want to keep working.”

Several people Kinsley knows no longer are living on the streets, she said. They’re in rehab programs, working with social workers, getting training for jobs or taking care of legal problems.

“It’s all a process of getting back to a point where they can be self-sufficient,” she said.

“And to know that there are people who have been put on that path because of that case is a tremendous feeling for me.”

She admits that most of her clients won’t win any popularity contests.

“They don’t wind up in the situations they’re in because they’re super popular and everybody loves them,” she said.

And that’s tough, she said.

“Part of our job — is to put them in the best possible position to win their case in court. Frequently, that means we can’t wage the same sort of PR campaign, for lack of a better term, that the state sometimes will. That makes it hard because people will only hear half the story.”

She noted photographer Thomas Condon as an example. Condon is serving a prison term for abusing corpses after he was convicted of manipulating bodies in the morgue, posing them with props and then photographing them.

“It’s been really tough because so much in the media has been negative toward him, and I understand that. I understand it’s a bizarre story. It strikes people differently, and it deals with tough topics.

“But Thomas Condon is a really good person and a wonderful person to know.

“So many conclusions were jumped to and things were said that simply aren’t true. If people simply sat down and talked to Thomas, which hasn’t been able to happen because of the criminal case — he has a right to remain silent.

“Hopefully when this is all over he will have the opportunity to speak out, and people will be able to see him for who he is.”

The criminal justice system often is no friend to defendants, she said.

The system, she said, “is totally focused on retribution and not at all focused on rehabilitation,” she said. “That’s a detriment not only to the people who are in the system but to society as a whole.

“We are taking people who are already inclined to feel angry and depressed and lonely and to want to act out because of those feelings and we’re making those feelings worse by locking (those people) away, by taking away their rights, by making them feel ostracized and making them feel like nobody is on their side or nobody cares.”

Society needs to be doing more to learn about the problems that cause people to turn to crime to begin with, Kinsley said.

“By and large, people don’t wind up committing crimes because everything is hunky-dory and they have everything they need and want. They are doing these activities because something is missing in their lives.”

Kinsley talks about the link between her faith and her passion for criminal defense law in a piece she wrote for her church’s Lenten Prayer Devotional.

“While some people question whether this type of work is in line with God’s teachings, the more time I spent with inmates and the more I learned about the law, the more connected I felt to God and his purpose for my life,” she wrote in the devotional for Hyde Park Community United Methodist Church.

If a lawyer knows a client is guilty, she still feels a call to do her best on that person’s behalf.

“I do see the argument that the (criminal justice) system only works if we make it work, and there needs to be two sides,” she said.

“That applies if the person is guilty or not guilty. We need to make the state stand up, hold it to its burden and make it do its job. Otherwise we run the risk that the system will collapse when we really need it to work.”

That, however, is not her impetus for wanting to represent people charged with crimes, she said. “I’ve always had a heart for the underdog and people who are picked on. I can see a person beyond their bad actions.” .

“I feel like so many times in our society and in the criminal justice system, people who are defendants are treated like scum — like they’re terrible people, like they’re evil monsters. And that’s just not the case. They’re human. They make mistakes like everybody else,” she said.

“Their mistakes might have more serious consequences, but there’s still some nugget of good in all of those people.”

Her deep care for others is part of the reason for her early career success, Sirkin said.

“She’s a talented attorney with a tremendous amount of passion, and she uses that passion in the most positive way possible,” Sirkin said.

“She has a brilliant career ahead of her,” he said.

Sirkin said he has mentored other young lawyers, but he quickly began looking at Kinsley as an equal, not someone to mentor. “She has a very rare talent,” he said, noting that he had been practicing about six or seven years before he began taking on the types of First Amendment issues that Kinsley has been tackling for quite some time. I’m unbelievably proud of her.”

Christian Jenkins — who left Sirkin’s firm with Marc Mezibov to start their own civil rights firm in November — also had high praise for Kinsley.

“Whatever she lacks in experience, she makes up for several-fold in enthusiasm,” he said.

If she doesn’t know something, she finds out, or finds an attorney with more experiences who has the answers, Jenkins said. Her deep care for her clients is clearly evident not only to the clients themselves but to other lawyers, Jenkins said.

For a while, her firm was requiring that she work mainly on pornography-related cases, Jenkins said. “She’s broken out of that a little and that’s terrific,” noting her work on the Cincinnati homelessness case. “She did an excellent job. I think she will continue to be very successful.”