Joseph C. Lyons was in law school nine years ago when Cherno Serray Jalloh came home to find the bullet-ridden corpses of his parents and siblings in the family's burning house in Sierra Leone.
Jalloh's father had incited soldiers by advocating free elections and providing food and financial support to the Kamajors, a militia formed to protect civilians. Jalloh fled the scene of the massacre, first to a displacement camp, then across the border to Guinea. Seven years ago, he arrived in the United States seeking political asylum.
What little Lyons knew then about violent upheaval in West Africa he might have gleaned from an undergraduate lecture at Harvard or from the dinner table in Andover where his father, a Philips Academy history teacher, often presided over discussions of world affairs.
It was not until he was an associate at Goulston & Storrs in Boston that he learned the price of political expression in Sierra Leone. That was when Lyons met Jalloh, and the lives of both men changed forever.
Last week, after years of hearings and legal briefs and appellate review, the US Department of Justice finally acknowledged that torture or death awaited Jalloh in Sierra Leone and granted him asylum.
''To be able to have this kind of impact on someone's life, it is hard to measure how rewarding that is," Lyons says of the years of nights and weekends working on the case he accepted as a volunteer for the nonprofit Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project (PAIR). For his part, Jalloh is both too relieved and wary to say much until he is actually holding the documents outlining his new legal status.
One can hardly begrudge his reticence. It is not easy in post-9/11 America to be a stranger in a strange land. In an age of terror and suspicion, the welcome that these shores have long represented to asylum seekers is tempered by fear. Lyons and dozens of colleagues at many of Boston's most distinguished law firms are choosing to be an antidote to that fear by donating their time and legal talents to PAIR.
Since it was founded in 1989 in response to the flood of asylum seekers from strife-torn El Salvador and Guatemala, PAIR has trained more than 700 lawyers to represent more than 1,000 clients, most of them fleeing political or religious persecution. The need grows every year, with asylum seekers now coming from more than 75 countries across the globe, according to Sarah Ignatius, executive director of PAIR and coach to volunteers who are often more familiar with bankruptcy proceedings or estate planning than immigration law.
''They're lawyers, so they know how to research. We link them up with mentors who have done cases for us in the past," she says of the fresh recruits without whom PAIR could not help a fraction of the asylum seekers who come through the door. ''We will never run out of people who need help and we will always need new lawyers to help us to help them."
A vigorous screening process weeds out fraudulent and weak cases, which helps to explain PAIR's 95 percent success rate. But even people at the greatest risk for persecution in their homelands can find the process daunting.
''Seven years is a long time for such a compelling case," Lyons says of Jalloh's bureaucratic journey toward asylum that ended when the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed an earlier denial.
For eight months while his case was in limbo, Jalloh was held in detention. He was released last summer after the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit remanded the case back to the Board of Immigration Appeals for another look. ''We got him out as fast as we could, and since then we have just been waiting," Lyons says.
The wait for Cherno Serray Jalloh ended last week. For the dozens of asylum seekers whose cases are being worked on this weekend by volunteers from Boston's legal community, the wait goes on.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.