Hamilton's final act leaves a legacy in Florida Law.

• Author: Kinnally, Nancy Maass
• Position: Lawyer John Hamilton's pro bono efforts in child custody case before dying of cancer - Pro Bono Pros

The two-year-old boy had been found clinging to his mother's lifeless body in her blood-soaked bed.

Fifteen shots, and thankfully not one of them had struck him. And now the father who had committed the murder wanted to exercise his parental rights, from jail, to determine who would raise the child he'd left traumatized and orphaned.

When John Hamilton saw the facts of the case, he knew this was not one he'd pass along to another pro bono attorney. No, this one he would keep. He often held onto the toughest ones when reviewing cases for the Legal Aid Society of the Orange County Bar Association.

Even as cancer began to ravage his lungs and spread throughout his body, Hamilton, a veteran appellate attorney with Foley & Lardner in Orlando, would go on preparing for what he figured would be his last oral argument--one in which a little boy's future hung in the balance.

At the last minute, though, he had to call on two other pro bono attorneys, Jamie Billotte Moses and Tom Young, to take his place.

"He was just too sick to do it," Moses said. "He was hospitalized the day before the argument, and went from the hospital to Hospice."

In the year since the murder, the toddler had been in the care of a maternal aunt he'd known ever since he was born. The killer wanted his own mother, who'd lived out of state and visited only twice before the murder, to adopt instead.

Twice denied in her petitions to adopt her grandson, the grandmother was now on her second appeal before Florida's Fifth District Court of Appeal. She and her son did not want the boy now called Lucas to remain with his aunt.

Custody could well have been the killer's motive all along. Since their breakup, he had made threats of violence against Lucas' mother and her family. (1) And yet, under Florida law, he still had a say in the matter.

Kate York, guardian ad litem staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of the Orange County Bar Association, said Florida's adoption statute allows for private interventions and adoptions in dependency cases. York, who had become involved in Lucas' case, beginning with the shelter hearing at which he was placed with his aunt, had filed a memorandum of law challenging the application of the statute to Lucas' case.

"There had been some argument in prior cases, right before this one, as to what 'in the custody of the department' meant. As in this case, foster care doesn't mean another relative; the argument being that the legislature didn't intend for...