Denny LeBoeuf spent 13 years bartending in the French Quarter before going to law school at Tulane, a path she returned to a decade later when a bar regular told her philosophy was a good prelude to a law degree. In this conversation with Sonya Pfeiffer, she traces that unlikely route into capital defense: a clinic case in her third year of law school that was already a homicide retrial, and a first capital case she took on straight out of school because, as the woman who recruited her put it, she was better than nothing.

Denny talks about what it meant to practice as one of the only women in Louisiana courtrooms in the late 1980s and 90s, including a federal arraignment where a judge addressed every man as "gentlemen" until he caught himself, and a St. Tammany Parish judge who called every white man "mister" and called every woman and every Black man by their first name. She describes what she did with the rage those moments produced, and how Hurricane Katrina exposed and then forced a rebuild of a public defender system that had let private cases crowd out capital ones.

She also covers her work founding the ACLU's John Adams Project, representing capitally charged detainees at Guantanamo, and what it took to get military lawyers and the human rights bar to recognize the cases needed capital-qualified counsel. Denny talks about Scharlette Holdman's invention of mitigation work, her decades-long friendship with Sister Helen Prejean, and why she still believes the death penalty is wrong "all the way up and all the way down." She closes with her advice to young women considering the work: come aboard.