It is one of the good, quiet stories. It is about repairing damage and reclaiming principles that got all beat up in a thuggish splurge of national payback.

The daughter of a friend of mine was among the lawyers who decided that the system of justice cannot allow for the picking and choosing of those who get fair treatment and those who don’t.

So she went to Guantanamo Bay to represent one of the prisoners rounded up in the aftermath of 9/11.

It is no easy piece of work. It means taking time away from a paying practice. It means working through an often tangled bureaucracy and traveling to that little slice of Cuba that remains under U.S. control. And it means working with defendants who are often distrustful of anything American.

But the lawyers who do it carry with them the very best of what we are about — equal justice and the right to be heard and the right to be fairly represented.

It is impossible to imagine the damage that Guantanamo has inflicted, the stain it has left. The disgrace and embarrassment will linger after the last prisoner is gone.

Just think about one person living a very basic Third World life suddenly taken prisoner, put on a plane and taken thousands of miles away to a place where he is isolated, cut off from everything he knows and moved about on his back on a small cart so his only view is straight up. He is held that way for years of tortured separation. And never in those years is he allowed the opportunity to walk into something resembling a courtroom and say, “I didn’t do it.”

Guantanamo can’t be closed soon enough. Hundreds of prisoners have already been released. There have been five suicides.

The lawyers become the break in the wall. They try to connect with clients unlike clients they have ever represented before. And through them, the stories trickle back. Through them, we get at least some idea of who is there and how they got caught up in the sweep of terror suspects. We hear of possibilities that some of those held at Guantanamo are guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some appear to have fallen victim to the simple failure of one country to understand the social and economic forces at work in another.

This week, in a story by The Journal’s Katie Mulvaney, we learned of two Rhode Island lawyers who have joined the effort to bring justice to a place where it has been too long delayed.

“I’m not doing it as a political person,” Deming Sherman told Mulvaney. “I’m doing it to vindicate the system, and here it’s getting abused.”

Sherman and Patricia Sullivan are partners in the firm of Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge, in Providence. They are used to working under far less edgy conditions than those at Guantanamo. But they have gone to the island prison in the belief that the system doesn’t work unless it works for everybody.

Their firm is picking up a healthy chunk of the tab.

They are representing an Afghan who has been in prison for nearly eight years without being criminally charged. At least, they’re trying to. They went to Guantanamo, but the man refused to see them or approve them as his lawyers.

They came back to Rhode Island and have hired an investigator to try to work through the man’s family to get the necessary approval.

It’s a different kind of lawyer story — one of trying to put the American way of doing things back on track.

It makes a person proud.

bkerr@projo.com