Defendants Who Have Represented Themselves

Other defendants, like Zacarias Moussaoui, the sole suspect charged in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, have chosen to represent themselves:

—Colin Ferguson, convicted for shooting and killing six people on N.Y.'s Long Island Railroad in 1993, dismissed his lawyers and decided to represent himself. He was eventually sentenced to life in prison.

—Rep. James A. Traficant Jr., D-Ohio, yelled at witnesses and the judge in his federal corruption trial. He was convicted this spring of racketeering, bribery and fraud. Traficant, who is not a lawyer, had also handled his own defense 19 years earlier when he was found innocent in a racketeering case.

—Assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian, who was convicted in 1999 of second-degree murder in the death of a man who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease.

—Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski asked to represent himself, but a judge turned down the request and he pleaded guilty in 1998 to a string of mail bombings.

—Walter Leroy Moody Jr. fired his lawyers and read a book through part of his 1996 trial in the mail-bomb murder of a federal judge in Alabama. He was convicted and sentenced to death. He also was found guilty separately in the death of a civil rights attorney.

—Marcus Carter, who was convicted in North Carolina for beating a woman to death with a brick in 1989. He was sentenced to death in 1992, but his sentence was commuted to life in prison eight years later because of fair trial concerns.

—In an international case, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is representing himself at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. His trial began Feb. 12.