Dr. Death, Attorney at Law
As the recently sentenced Dr.
Death begins his 10 to 25 years
of air-conditioned heel-cooling
in the Michigan gulag system,
it's high time to amend the
cliché, "A lawyer who
represents himself has a fool
for a client." (It's a
cliché, we might add,
only because it's so true, which
is itself a cliché, only
because it's so, well,
cliché.) Indeed, with the
ready example of Jack
Kevorkian's conviction for
second-degree murder before us,
we can fully appreciate that
it's not simply smug shysters
who have shit for brains. MDs
have now officially joined the
parade of self-deluding idiots.
Had Kevorkian not passed so much
time in close proximity to car
exhaust and other
brain-deadening vapors, he might
have paused before deciding to
act as his own counsel. Indeed,
had he done the minimal legal
research that a real lawyer—or
even his former attorney, the
estimable Geoffrey Fieger, who
is currently arguing in court
that TV's Jenny Jones is a
killer—might have insisted
upon, Kevorkian would have
realized that even (or
especially) "innocent" men
accused of murder do pretty
badly when representing
themselves in court. To wit, the
cases of Colin Ferguson, Mumia
Abu-Jamal, and Charles Manson.
In 1993, Ferguson killed six
people on a Long Island Railroad
commuter train. When the
Jamaican immigrant came up for
trial a couple of years later,
he waved off legal
representation from radical chic
lawyers William Kunstler and
Ronald Kuby after they insulted
him by suggesting—nay,
insisting—that he was more
than a little coconuts and that
an insanity plea was his only
possible ticket to slide. As
Kuby put it, "We have a right to
portray him as a profoundly
disturbed individual who
suffered from mental illness
brought on by exposure to white
racism."
Ferguson's "black
rage," however, was in this
instance directed only at the
special Ks, whom he demoted to
"advisers," before proceeding to
put on a legal clinic that only
a punch-drunk jurist like Judge
Mills Lane could have followed.
Included were Perry Mason moves
such as asking one eyewitness,
"Is it your testimony that you
saw no one shot?" The response:
"I saw you shooting everyone on
the train, OK?"
He also asked
jurors to raise their hands if
they were "hockey fans" and,
after a slew of people had
testified against him, boasted
to Larry King that he would be
acquitted precisely because
"very few witnesses were able to
point a finger at me." While
such a defense went a long way
toward proving Kunstler and
Kuby's insanity case, it failed
to sway the requisite single
juror, and Ferguson was
sentenced to 200—count 'em –
years.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted in
1982 of killing a Philadelphia
policeman, has simultaneously
fared better and worse than
Ferguson. On the upside,
Abu-Jamal's journalism career,
which had been languishing for
some years (he was driving a
taxi at the time of the
shooting), really got back on
track after his conviction.
He became a National Public
Radio commentator, and his book,
Live from Death Row, became a
big seller.
Over the years,
glitterati such as novelist E.
L. Doctorow have come to his
defense, and just this past
January, a Free Mumia benefit
concert featuring Rage Against
the Machine, the Beastie Boys,
and other acts drew a crowd of
20,000. On the downside, after
defending himself, Abu-Jamal
received both a death sentence
and highly public support from
such embarrassingly
low-magnitude TV stars as Ed
Asner and Mike Farrell.
Like Ferguson, Abu-Jamal's
self-defense was filled with
what might charitably be
described as tactical blunders,
such as eliciting this testimony
from a cabbie on the scene: "I
saw you, buddy. I saw you shoot
him and I never took my eyes off
you." He also spent a fair
amount of court time expounding
on the racial separatist group
MOVE's philosophy and openly
insulted the racially mixed jury
during the penalty phase.
Abu-Jamal, now represented by
Leonard Weinglass (memorably
described by one reporter as
"perhaps the eighth smartest
member of the Chicago Seven"),
is working on his final death
row appeal. If it goes nowhere,
which is the likely scenario,
given the defense's inability to
explain away key physical
evidence and the fact that one
of its strategies involves a
search for an unidentified
gunman with "Johnny Mathis hair"
– he will almost certainly be
given a lethal injection.
Surprisingly, that's a fate that
Charlie Manson, the undisputed
champion of lawyers with fools
for clients, has managed to
avoid. The would-be pop star's
bid at self-representation went
so spectacularly wrong that even
though he could not be
definitively placed at the scene
of either the Tate or the
LaBianca murders in 1969, he
managed to garner a death
penalty on seven counts of
first-degree murder and one
count of conspiracy to commit
murder (the death sentence was
later commuted to "life with the
possibility of parole" when
executions were ruled
unconstitutional in the 1970s).
How did Manson swing such an
outcome? With tactics
unthinkable even on a
sweeps-week episode of Ally
McBeal: He fired his lawyer and
threatened him with death,
physically attacked the judge,
carved a swastika in his
forehead during the proceedings,
and delivered statements filled
with lines such as, "If I could
I would jerk this microphone out
and beat your brains out with it
because that is what you
deserve, that is what you
deserve."
Kevorkian, to his credit—if
not the benefit of Court TV's
ratings—did not engage in the
sort of legal high jinks that
distinguished the Ferguson,
Abu-Jamal, and Manson cases.
Indeed, Dr. Death essentially
laid it on the line and simply
asked the jury, "Just look at
me. Do you see a murderer?" In
the end, however, such arguments
proved no more compelling than
Ferguson's, Abu-Jamal's, or
Manson's, and the jury voted
thumbs down. Kevorkian showed up
at the sentencing phase with a
bona fide lawyer and statements
of support from the widow and
the brother of the man he
killed, but by then it was too
little, too late.
While one might think that such
a recent, high-profile,
self-defense flop, not to
mention the seemingly unending
list of do-it-yourself legal
losers, might put the kibosh on
the practice, it seems, to
paraphrase another
cliché, that dopes spring
eternal. Indeed, even as the
cell door was slamming shut on
Kevorkian, Chuck Jones, the
former publicist for Marla
Maples who in 1994 was found
guilty of stealing and entering
into an unholy union with the
former Mrs. Trump's shoes,
announced that he would serve as
his own lawyer in his upcoming
retrial (his conviction was
overturned in 1996 on the
grounds that he was "deprived of
counsel"). His first action was
to enter Maples' psychiatric
records into the proceedings.
Seemingly laying the groundwork
for his own insanity plea, Jones
told the New York Daily News,
"Marla has a history of mental
depression…. A lot of things
that she thought happened were
in her mind. I know the whole
story. She invented danger that
was nonexistent." Pledging that
he was only going to "bring out
the facts," the shoe fetishist
perhaps unconsciously signaled
his real strategy by insisting,
"I don't want her to leave the
court crying." In other words,
it's all over but the shouting –
and the sentencing.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.