Is there a term for fascination with lawyers? Love them, hate them. Mostly the latter, it seems. It’s your fault, you know. Drama. You love a good drama, and there’s no better place for it than a courtroom.
Heck, you love bad dramas too. Tiger King outed us all on that. As long as the drama contains high drama, and by that I mean the lowest, evil skullduggery versus angelic highs. Oops, don’t need that part, actually. Wanton stupidity often suffices. Anyway, the point is, we love drama. Well, so long as it’s not ours. Lawyers know this too.
Originally published in the Gainesville Times, January 17, 1989, Alex Taylor Crime Stories discusses our love affair with trial lawyers. Oh, and there’s a bit on Bolita, toward the end.
TRANSCRIPT:
Have you recently visited the courthouse and sat through a trial just to watch the mystery unfold during a great legal battle? Did you watch closely how the combatants maneuvered evidence just as a field commander maneuvers troops?
For Americans, courtroom battles have a particularly strong fascination. Some of our trials are a unique fusion of art and reality, combining all the elements of theatrical drama with the seriousness of real life-and-death situations.
When two or more talented and well prepared trial lawyers meet in legal combat before judge and jury, we have real drama unparalleled in the theatrical sense.
Only in American courtrooms are the great issues of politics, morality and religion thrashed out — from the Salem witch trials and that’s why we look upon great trial lawyers as true American champions.
Throughout history, scholars have followed the careers of great legal champions such as Clarence Darrow, Benjamin Cardozo, Joseph Di Mona, F. Lee Bailey and Melvin Belli. Of them all, perhaps Darrow and Belli remain the most interesting.
Born in the backwoods of Ohio in 1857, Clarence Seward Darrow finished only the first grade in school, then began reading law books. In 1878, at age 21, he completed law school and was admitted to the bar.
He began to win important cases, apparently on his uncanny ability to pick juries. Darrow was fond of saying, “Give me six Jews and six Irishmen, and I could get Judas Iscariot off with a $5 fine.”
In 1925, Darrow defended his most famous client, John T. Scopes, in the highly publicized Monkey Trial. Scopes, 25-year-old science teacher, had been charged with violating state law that forbade the teaching of any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation. Darrow’s opposition was a devout fundamentalist and three-time presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.
During the 11-day trial, Darrow called Bryan to the stand and literally reduced him to a bumbling witness.
At one point, Darrow asked Bryan, “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” “No sir,” said Bryan, “I leave the agnostics to hunt for her!”
Darrow-finally lost the trial when Scopes was fined $100, but the case was overturned on a legal technicality and the prosecution dropped the charges.
One of the more successful lawyers of the modern era, Melvin Belli who was born in 1907, is still considered the King of Torts, or civil law.
And like a lot of famous lawyers, he has had his share of celebrated clients. Representing everyone from actor Errol Flynn, to murderer Jack Ruby, Belli draws a crowd to each trial.
He once won a case for a client who had been sold a dress that had been returned from a mortician where it had dressed a corpse. (The smell of embalming fluid had made her sick.)
And in a more humorous case, he successfully sued a theatre where his client sat in a seat someone had conveniently used as a toilet.
Belli is famous for stating that preparing for a lawsuit is like preparing to fight a battle . . . but sometimes you have to prepare for war!
I once sat through a trial in Tampa where Belli had sued Life magazine for depicting Tampa attorney Frank Regano as a Mafia associate. Regano became Belli’s worst witness and he lost the battle . . . but the war was worth watching.
Alex Taylor’s column on criminology and history appears in The Times on Tuesdays.
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About that:
Factoid 1: Frank Ragano’s Mob Lawyer provided a few inspirational nuggets woven into Bolita where artistic license mandated. Interesting but subjective read, and I’ll leave the veracity part to its omnipotent critics.
Factoid 2: Melvin Belli’s career included actual acting, including his appearance in Star Trek’s Original Series as Gorgan (The Devil), who … um … had a thing for kids.
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