At a time when airwaves brimmed with cops, crusaders, and confessionals, Defense Attorney chose the harder path—standing beside the accused, parsing doubt from rumor, and insisting that due process is not just a civic ritual but a moral stance.

What makes the series linger isn’t spectacle but temperament. The cases are built on careful, humane attention—how people talk when they’re cornered, how memory buckles, how fear distorts motive. The show’s rhythm favors listening over grandstanding, and its conclusions rarely snap shut with tidy moral arithmetic. Even when guilt is proved, the series leaves you with the echoing questions that real justice work always does: What led here? Who gets believed? What do we owe each other when the facts are murky?

So much of that weight comes through in the performances. Defense Attorney boasted a talented cast led by the acclaimed actress Mercedes McCambridge in the role of Martha Ellis Bryant; steel without swagger—unyielding in cross-examination, genuinely tender with the frightened and the wronged. It’s a portrait of advocacy as both craft and calling, and it feels astonishingly contemporary. In an era that often framed women on radio as ornaments or ornaments with grit, this show gave us a professional who commanded the room by thinking more clearly than anyone else in it.

Which makes the survival of any episodes feel like a small miracle. Old-time radio preservation is a race against the chemistry of tape and the forgetfulness of institutions; what endures often owes as much to stubborn collectors as it does to archives. That’s why today’s update matters: we have nine new episodes to add, bringing our available set to 13. As far as we can determine, that number likely represents the full slate of extant recordings. If you know otherwise—if a reel is sleeping in a shoebox, if a broadcast transcription disc has been mislabeled in a private collection—please get in touch. The show deserves as full a record as the past can give it.

Listening to these episodes in 2026, you hear more than period atmosphere. You hear a defense of defense itself: the idea that advocating for the accused is not a loophole in the moral order but one of its foundations. In a media landscape that still struggles to balance outrage with rigor, Defense Attorney’s quiet insistence on standards—investigate, corroborate, doubt—feels like a bracing lesson.

We’re grateful to share the additional nine programs and to keep this series in circulation for new ears. It isn’t nostalgia we’re after; it’s continuity. The questions the show asks—about fairness, courage, and the discipline of withholding judgment until the evidence speaks—are not going away. With 13 episodes now available, Defense Attorney stands less as a relic than as a reminder: justice is a practice, and practice is something you do, case by case, voice by voice.

Happy Listening, my friends--