Black, proud and ready to make a difference, Allegheny County's new chief public defender gets to work

When Lena Bryan-Henderson was growing up in Wilkinsburg in the 1970s, her family dinner conversations frequently revolved around civil rights.

“It was table talk every evening almost — about the prejudices and the injustices that people who look like me had to endure,” she said.

Then, when she was about 7, her stepfather and several of his colleagues were fired from their jobs as Port Authority bus drivers for wearing “Free Angela” buttons.

They were part of a national movement showing support for Angela Davis, the iconic Black academic and political activist whose imprisonment and eventual acquittal after being linked to a 1970 shootout at a California courthouse became a cause celebre.

For months, Bryan-Henderson heard her mom and stepdad talking about Joseph J. Pass, the longtime Pittsburgh union lawyer working to get the men their jobs back.

“I knew our life was dependent on whether Joe Pass was successful,” Bryan-Henderson said.

He was. Her stepdad went back to work, and Bryan-Henderson learned an important lesson: “It showed the impact that an attorney could have on a family and community.”

She knew then she would become a lawyer. She did, and her first legal job was with Pass at his firm.

Her second — which has spanned more than 32 years — was with the Allegheny County Public Defender’s Office. Until recently, she was an assistant public defender in the trial unit representing indigent defendants.

Now Bryan-Henderson runs the place.

Last month, Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato appointed her to become chief public defender — the first Black woman to ever hold the office.

It is a milestone that she views with respect and awe.

“It is not lost on me that I stand on the shoulders of so many people who have sacrificed and endured to allow someone like me to be able to take this position,” said Bryan-Henderson, 59, of Forest Hills during a recent interview with TribLive.

“I understand that I am a descendant of slaves, and I know that there are so many people smiling because I’m in this position.”

Changes afoot

Bryan-Henderson is taking over a public defender’s office that has stabilized over the past several years — but only after it was long plagued by high caseloads, low pay and poor morale.

The annual budget for the office has consistently increased of late, rising to more than $13 million this year from just over $9 million in 2019.

Salaries, which were among the lowest of all public defenders in the state for many years, also have improved.

A new attorney joining the office now will make almost $67,000, up from about $40,000 five years ago. Bryan-Henderson will earn $136,326 in her new role.

The public defender’s office is the largest criminal defense law firm in Pittsburgh, Bryan-Henderson said. It has 97 attorneys, including seven who are Black, and 139 full-time staff. They closed more than 3,500 cases in 2023 and made nearly 100,000 court appearances.

Bryan-Henderson, who long advocated for improvements in the office, is proud of the work it does. But she also is excited to see it take its next big steps.

As part of a “fresh start project,” she intends to create a unit focusing on pardons and expungements, broadening the office’s current efforts to include scrubbing people’s records of charges that don’t lead to a conviction.

With a Democratic governor and a more-willing state pardons and parole board, she said “it’s the opportune time to try and get people’s records cleared.”

Doing so, she said, would give clients more opportunities for employment, education and housing.

Bryan-Henderson wants to launch a program to connect clients with resources to address poverty, mental illness and substance abuse. That way, she said, her staff can go beyond legal representation and help people address underlying problems.

She hopes to create “sustainable, transformative changes in the lives of our clients, their families and the communities in which they live.”

The new chief public defender plans to demystify the legal process by educating the community about how it works and improving the perception of the office.

Bryan-Henderson also said she intends to make her office more diverse — not only in terms of gender and race but also by hiring lawyers from other cities and varied backgrounds.

“I’m talking about attracting people with different ways of thinking,” she said.

‘Just being me’

Bryan-Henderson grew up on the eastern side of Allegheny County but has deep ties to McKeesport and Duquesne, where her parents were raised.

They taught her to advocate for those around her.

“I grew up with a family that did not shield me from the injustices in the world,” she said. “They almost groomed me to do something to elevate the plight of the people in our community.”

One of those people, she said, was the late Allegheny County civil rights activist Clifton Pitts.

He was her godfather.

Bryan-Henderson, who spent much of her childhood in the Mon Valley where her grandparents lived, watched him over the years and saw the impact he had across the region just by picking up the phone.

Pitts, who died in 2020 from complications of covid-19, served as the director of the Mon Valley People’s Action Committee. He also was the former president of the Duquesne/West Mifflin NAACP and fought for equal housing, employment and education.

“He showed me how important it was to fight for people’s rights in the community,” Bryan-Henderson said. “Organizing is like second nature to me.”

When she was a senior in high school, Bryan-Henderson applied to just one college — Howard University, the historically Black school in Washington, D.C., where her cousin attended. She was accepted and studied political science and English before attending law school at Duquesne University.

Bryan-Henderson’s identity as a Black woman has been an inextricable part of her life.

Early in her legal career, she said, she decided to follow the example of her mother and wear her hair naturally — even though that wasn’t the style at the time. She had a large Afro, much like Angela Davis.

“I just always thought, ‘This is me. How can you tell me not to be me?’ ” she said.

Over the years, her style changed to include braids. Now it is shorter but with eye-catching purple to cover the gray, she said.

“I wasn’t making a statement,” she said. “I was just being me.”

Bryan-Henderson, who has always loved to dance, continues to take Chicago step dance classes twice a week at the Wilkins School Community Center near Regent Square and enjoys African drumming classes.

Creating a space

Four years ago, Bryan-Henderson founded the Pittsburgh Black Lawyers Alliance.

The group was created after an Allegheny County Common Pleas judge, Mark V. Tranquilli, who is white, came under fire for making racist comments about a juror in a criminal case he was presiding over.

Bryan-Henderson heard the allegations and felt compelled to take action. She remembers it was a Thursday, and she started calling all of the Black attorneys she knew. They scheduled a meeting for Saturday afternoon at her house.

A dozen showed up.

“We sat down, and we decided that we needed to do something to combat those antics, but we also decided that we needed an organization,” she said.

Tranquilli resigned in disgrace in 2020. But the Black lawyers group is still going strong today, holding legal education programs and hosting political events.

“I didn’t have a lot of mentors, so I wanted to create a space for young Black attorneys who had time and (a) vehicle to educate the community,” she said. “I wanted also to have a group that young people could look upon as leaders.”

The alliance has grown to 35 members. Bryan-Henderson remains active as its vice president.

The perfect mix

Kelvin Morris, a Black criminal defense attorney, met Bryan-Henderson about eight years ago. He had seen her in court, but they had never spoken.

One day, she walked up to the young lawyer outside the courthouse on Forbes Avenue and introduced herself.

They quickly became friends.

“She’s sort of like a community organizer,” Morris said, describing her as “straightforward.” “She’s always galvanizing people to do things. She puts pressure on us lawyers to be engaged and giving.”

Over the years, Morris said, Bryan-Henderson has raised money among attorneys to help pay for classes to prepare law students to take the bar exam and worked to find mentors for them.

Angela Hayden met Bryan-Henderson while working as a young public defender in 2013. She described her as the perfect mix of mother figure, good girlfriend and someone with wisdom.

“She’s also a problem solver,” said Hayden, who is now in private practice.

She described her mentor as always putting her clients first.

“I think Lena has the right kind of demeanor to use her passion and get what her clients want without turning people off,” Hayden said.

Frank Walker, a defense attorney and president of the Pittsburgh Black Lawyers Alliance, said Bryan-Henderson commanded the room at that first meeting.

Among her strengths, Walker said, is her ability to work well with judges, prosecutors and her office’s clients.

“There’s a delicate balance she needs to walk to get things done,” Walker said.

Bryan-Henderson used the word diplomacy.

“My goal is to represent my clients to the best of the ability of the public defender’s office,” she said. “So if that means that I have to rein a lawyer in, that’s what I’m going to do. If that means that I have to fight fervently in front of a judge, that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lifelong preparation

It seems like Bryan-Henderson has been preparing to be chief public defender her entire career, Morris said.

“It’s a natural fit.”

Walker agreed.

“Lena really has a heart for this work and the people she serves,” he said. “She has the experience and tenacity to back it up.”

Bryan-Henderson has been married to her husband, Juan Henderson, a caseworker for the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services, for 32 years. She said now is the right time to take on such a challenging new position. Their two sons are grown, and she is no longer caring for her parents, who died in the past few years.

“I can now commit the time and the effort to take the office to a different level,” she said. “My vision that I have for the office aligns with this administration’s vision of serving the people in Allegheny County.”

In addition to her work with the Black lawyers group, Bryan-Henderson also serves as a board member for Reimagine Reentry, a program that helps formerly incarcerated people return to society. She also is a member of Allegheny Lawyers Initiative for Justice.

Rob Perkins, a defense attorney who competed against Bryan-Henderson for the chief public defender post, praised his former rival as the person to head the office where he worked two separate stints.

He called her a leader in the criminal justice system.

“She’s able to see how everything is interconnected. She understands the humanity of the people involved — not just clients but victims,” Perkins said. “It’s not theoretical or academic to her. These are momentous decisions the systems makes about hundreds of people every day.”

He praised Bryan-Henderson for having the willingness and courage to speak up when things aren’t right, which has not always been the case in that office.

“If you want to move the ball forward on criminal justice reform and social justice, the PD’s office does that every day,” he said. “I think they have a ton of talent and resources. But there’s more to be done.”

He expects Bryan-Henderson to be a powerful voice.

She hopes so.

“I grew up with this philosophy: ‘To whom much is given, much is expected,’ ” she said. “And I am obligated to do my best for the people that our office serves.”

Correction: Lena Bryan-Henderson was an assistant public defender in the Allegheny County Public Defender’s trial division when she was appointed last month to be the chief public defender. A previous version of this story misstated her prior position.