Rick Kammen

Class of 1968: National criminal defense lawyer

Richard “Rick” Kammen wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer for as long as he can remember. Looking back on his career, “I was lucky that I wanted to do something that it turned out I was good at,” he said.

“If people have their day in court and feel like they were listened to, heard and treated fairly, then the system has worked. I think that is very important. In many respects, lawyers provide the lubrication that makes society work. The goal (for lawyers) is to find a way — ethically and legally within the bounds of what’s appropriate — to win the case if it can possibly be done. That’s the way the system is supposed to work.”

Kammen was born Oct. 23, 1946, in Indianapolis, Indiana. At Ripon, he majored in economics and politics and government. He participated in WRPN radio, Crimson yearbook and Theta Chi/Alpha Omega Alpha, and he was commissioned through ROTC.

He received his law degree from New York University in 1971 and served in the U.S. Army Reserves.

For more than 40 years, Kammen was a criminal defense attorney concentrating on white-collar defense, complex crimes and healthcare issues. He also became one of the premier death penalty lawyers in the United States. He was appointed by the United States District Courts to represent capitally charged defendants throughout the United States.

Many people and even some lawyers might recoil from having contact with someone associated with such crimes, Kammen said, but to him it was simply about seeing humans rather than crimes.

“I think you have to see people as more than the worst thing they’ve ever done,” Kammen said. “I have seen people who have certainly been accused of doing horrific things, but who have shown tremendous courage, and tremendous grace and great sensitivity. I think people are more complex than how we want to simplify them. In the end, you’re helping people.”

For 10 years, he led a team of military and civilian lawyers representing Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, charged with orchestrating the October 2000 USS Cole naval warship bombing and facing the death penalty at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

After retiring, Kammen was inspired by his own true experiences to write a fictionalized book, “Tortured Justice, Guantanamo Bay,” published in January 2023. The main character, also an attorney, finds himself involved in fascinating but very tough cases. His second book, “Tortured Justice South Carolina,” was released in the spring of 2024.His third book, “Tortured Justice Alabama,” was published in 2025.

Kammen credits Ripon’s liberal arts education with setting the foundation for his life’s work. “Ripon was very helpful to me,” he said. “It was small, I had the opportunity to do things I would never have had the opportunity to do at a bigger school — freshmen football, sports broadcaster. Giving me a degree of self-confidence was incredibly significant.

“I came away from Ripon with a desire to continue to learn and not become stagnant. One of the things I enjoy about law and what I do is there’s always new things to learn and other people to learn from. We deal with a lot of different issues — scientific issues, issues of mental health, psychiatry, areas of communication. A liberal arts education helped me understand that there is a lot of overlap in a lot of different disciplines.”

He and his wife, Linda Jones Kammen, Class of 1969, established the Richard and Linda Jones Kammen ’68 ’69 Endowed Scholarship Fund at Ripon College.