FEBRUARY 28, 2023 – (Cont.) Almost all of my cases pled out. The public defenders were masters at their trade.
One was always about to bust out of his shirt; an obvious body-builder, who, I suspected, was still caught in an adolescent need to compensate for the fact he was shorter than average. His dedication to weight-lifting was matched by his voluble certitude. His name was Jeff Anderson, and within a few short years he’d achieve international acclaim suing the Catholic church over its big, dirty secrets.
The other two public defenders were “old school,” tall, lanky, craggy-faced and chain-smokers. One wore alligator boots and a cowboy hat. He was, in fact, a real cowboy, who owned acreage and horses just outside of Stillwater. These lawyers of the Greatest Generation taught me lots about practicing law by the seat of your pants.
My first big humiliation as a lawyer was losing a DWI jury case to the Marlboro Man. It wasn’t an open-and-shut case for me, the prosecutor, and I tried it more for the experience than for the win: no one back at the firm would have to know if I lost, but everyone would get to know if I won. I’d prepared as much as possible. Marlboro Man, Esq. was clearly winging it—and, as it turned out, winning it. But as I easily discerned, he knew everyone on the jury or at least was well acquainted with their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles. The experience gave me appreciation for the line, “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
My next brush with criminal law occurred many years later in a most improbable setting. I represented the ousted leader of a local mosque in his battle against the faction that had effectively removed him by changing the locks. Legally speaking, it was a matter of corporate law—specifically, corporate governance. Practically speaking, it was something quite different: a political battle with origins reaching back to tribal rifts during colonial times in Somalia. In a cleverly dishonest maneuver, the “bad guys” went to the cops with the accusation that my guy had embezzled funds from the mosque.
The cops fell for it, and I made the mistake of thinking I could set them straight. I miscalculated further by sitting on a bent folding chair across the table from the dull, humorless investigator in an airless, windowless room at police headquarters, where my sleeves stuck to the day-old, dried-up, overly-sweetened coffee spill on my side of the table. As if on cue, a captain entered the room through a side door. When I stood up, he stepped up to me, nose-to-nose, pressed his finger into my sternum and threatened to charge me with conspiracy and theft for having accepted “dirty money” in payment of my legal fees . . . “If,” he said, “you don’t back off.”
Upon my escape, I called a friend who was a criminal defense lawyer. He took my client’s case, but not before educating me about intimidation shenanigans that police deploy with regularity. I was shocked. I was a white dude in a suit. Imagine myself, I thought, as a Black guy wearing a hoodie! I acquired a deep respect for the criminal defense bar: my client was never charged with any wrong-doing . . . and neither was I.
Now that you know the sum total of my criminal law training, knowledge and experience, I’ll share my non-expert thoughts about . . . the Murdaugh Murders. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
