Dead Man Walking Free

 

Cooney’s wife, Betsy, says it’s not unusual for her husband to fully devote himself to a case. “Jim can get so wrapped up when he’s working. It’s like he goes into his own little room,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like it’s my job to knock on the door and say, ‘Come on out and join the rest of us for a while.’”

 

Like many people who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, Cooney says he always saw the law as a way to make a difference. A summer internship at Washington, D.C.’s Arnold & Porter, founded by famed civil rights lawyer and Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas, convinced Cooney he could work for a big firm and still do pro bono cases.

 

After a clerkship with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, he and his wife moved with their two daughters (a third would come later) to Charlotte in 1983, where he joined Kennedy Covington Lobdell & Hickman.

 

Cooney, a practicing Catholic, travels the state in his free time giving PowerPoint presentations on what he sees as the state’s flawed death penalty system. While attacking this system, he defends the much-maligned software program — which he also used to great effect in arguing for Gell’s retrial and winning his acquittal.

 

“People don’t know how to use PowerPoint properly. They just fill it full of bullet points,” he says with a smile. “I like to make it dance.”

 

Pollard, who has since left Womble Carlyle to work for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, says it’s not the PowerPoint software but the way Cooney uses it that makes him persuasive. “The PowerPoint is just a tool, but it’s not the focus. With Jim the focus is the conversation. Jim is like your favorite professor in college — the guy who made economics very understandable.”

 

Cooney says he works on knowing the facts of a case cold, so that he never makes a misstatement to the jury, even inadvertently.

 

“Jury work is simple: The first liar will lose,” says Cooney. “A jury is the ultimate truth detector. You’ve got these 12 people coming together, and between the 12 of them, they will pick up on a lie.”

 

It’s an approach he uses for both paying and non-paying clients. “Sometimes [practicing law] is a great way to pay the mortgage and sometimes it’s a crusade, and when it is, it’s great,” he says. “But you have to believe in what you’re doing — whether it’s [defending] an innocent man on death row or a doctor who just made an honest mistake.”

 

 

Not all of Cooney’s cases have been as morally or legally obvious as Gell’s. Some of Cooney’s clients have committed appalling crimes. Chief among them: Henry Louis Wallace, who confessed on tape to killing 10 women and who remains on death row today. Tompkins says working on bleak cases such as Wallace’s helped Cooney hone his trial skills.

 

“That’s like getting up every morning and going to court and running into a brick wall every day for four months,” says Tompkins of Wallace’s 1996 trial. After failing to suppress Wallace’s confession, in which he revealed ghastly details, Cooney and the defense team tried arguments based on Wallace’s mental illness. But the jury was not persuaded, convicting Wallace of all nine murders in which he was charged.

 

Another difficult circumstance arose for Cooney in 1993, when he was defending Allen Gaines, who was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of a Charlotte police officer. While the jury deliberated Gaines’ sentence, two young patrol officers were shot and killed in the line of duty. The city boiled over in outrage. Under that inflammatory shadow, the jury still chose life in prison, rather than the death penalty, for Gaines.

 

Law enforcement was furious. Yet when four members of the Charlotte police department were sued for malicious prosecution in 1997, they chose Cooney, along with Tompkins, to defend them. Murder charges against Charlotte doctor Ed Friedland, who had been accused of killing his wife, had been dropped after a key pathologist’s opinion was ruled inadmissible, and Friedland sued two homicide detectives, their sergeant and the deputy police chief. After four years of discovery, Cooney took 40 depositions, 12,000 pages of testimony and 10,000 pages of exhibits and distilled them into a 65-page motion for summary judgment that was ultimately granted. “It is the best piece of legal work I have seen in my 44 years of law practice,” says Tompkins.

 

Cooney also scored an unpopular victory in 1994, when he won a new sentencing hearing for Fred Coffey, who was to be executed for smothering a 10-year-old Charlotte girl. Coffey received life in prison, where he remains today. Cooney says people failed to consider the horrific abuse that Coffey suffered as a child. “He was warped into what he is,” says Cooney. “It’s not that he shouldn’t be punished, and he is being punished. But when you take a look at everything that happened to this man, he never had a chance.”

 

While willing to take on such tough cases, Cooney — who has an X-ray reader and skeleton model in his office — is also in the state’s upper echelon of medical malpractice attorneys. He has argued many times on the opposite side of plaintiff ’s attorney and former presidential candidate John Edwards, whom Cooney warmly refers to as “Johnny.”

 

“He was not the best at any given thing — direct exams, closing arguments,” says Cooney, who contributed to Edwards’ presidential campaign. “But he did everything very, very well, from soup to nuts.”

 

Cooney has suffered some hard losses, too. He fought for 13 years to save the life of John Noland, who was convicted of killing his estranged wife’s father and sister. An artist’s courtroom rendering of Cooney arguing on Noland’s behalf hangs at eye level behind Cooney’s desk. Noland was executed in 1998. In audio archives kept by the state corrections department, Cooney gives his reaction moments after witnessing Noland die by lethal injection: “I am convinced that sometime in the future we are going to look back on this and think this was nothing but deliberate, premeditated, calculated madness.”

 

 

The case Cooney did not have time for is still very much a part of his life. Months after he was released from prison, Alan Gell spent a weekend at Cooney’s southeast Charlotte home so they could travel together to Asheville, where Cooney received a state bar award for his pro bono work. The family took Gell to a Japanese steakhouse — where he tasted sushi for the first time — and later they watched the inspiring prison movie The Shawshank Redemption, which just happened to be on TV that night. Gell, who attends Martin County Community College and speaks to groups around the state in support of a two-year death penalty moratorium, says Cooney told him he feels responsible for him. Cooney often gives Gell advice on building a life after nearly nine years behind bars.

 

“I was unlucky that I was put on death row, but I was really lucky that I had Jim representing me,” Gell says. “Knowing that Jim is out there, expecting me to do good, makes me work that much harder.”

 

Cooney continues to split his time between his pro bono and private clients, as well as sifting through more requests for help. Since Gell’s well-publicized acquittal, Cooney estimates that at least 150 inmates have contacted his office. He says he considers them all.

 

“But I haven’t found another Alan Gell,” he says. “Yet.”