Representing the Reprehensible

Not everyone has occasion to sit eye to eye with a serial killer and swap philosophies on life. But John Henry Browne has — and in the process he’s discovered a few things about the American legal system, human behavior, and even himself. 

The longtime Seattle criminal defense attorney, known for his often combative personality, flamboyant courtroom style and successful representation of some of the most notorious defendants in Washington history, tells the story of his meeting with Ted Bundy in a Florida maximum-security jail cell in the 1970s, after Bundy became a suspect in a string of murders in Washington and other Western states.

“It was a 10-by-12-foot cell,” Browne recalls, “and Ted turns around and looks at me and says, ‘You know, the reason you’ve been my lawyer for so long is because we’re so much alike.’ ”

Browne pauses for effect, just as he might do when addressing a jury. The listener’s mind fills with the vaguely remembered image of a handsome but homicidal Bundy, the ex-law school student and Republican Party activist who would eventually confess to killing more than 30 girls and young women between 1973 and 1978, for which he was executed in 1989. Finally, the attorney continues: “I remember going back afterwards to this fleabag hotel in Tallahassee, and the mirror there was all cracked and smoky, like in a Humphrey Bogart movie. And I looked at myself in it and I said, ‘What the hell are you doing here? How did you end up here?’

“He later explained to me, by the way, what he’d meant by that remark,” Browne says. “To him, it meant that if he hadn’t gone down ‘the dark side,’ he would have wanted to do what I did — be a lawyer.”

Which isn’t to suggest that any Ted, Dick or Harry would be happy to take on the sort of work Browne and his colleagues do every day: defending men and women accused of the most heinous crimes imaginable, from rape and other assaults to mass murder. These are tasks that can bring great monetary rewards, it’s true, as well as moments of satisfaction for having protected les miserables from being buried in the legal system. But these are also tasks that can lead to self-abuse and disillusionment. Not to mention public castigation and death threats.

Job requirement: thick skin

“I think people often have a difficult time understanding our situation, why we take on some of the clients we do,” says Eric Lindell, a Seattle trial attorney who’s represented, among others, Green River killer Gary Ridgway and Kevin Cruz. Cruz was charged in November 1999 with shooting to death two workers and wounding another pair at Seattle’s Northlake Shipyard, where he had previously been employed. “ [People] occasionally wind up taking the anger they feel toward our clients out on us instead, not recognizing that our job as lawyers is to mount a solid defense, no matter what crime our clients are accused of. I’ve had odd phone calls from people — threatening phone calls sometimes — though not a lot. And I’ve had some hate mail.”

Lindell tells, too, of trying to move his law offices from Issaquah to Mercer Island in the heat of negotiations over Ridgway’s fate (after leading investigators to the graves of his victims, Ridgway was ultimately sentenced to life  imprisonment without parole). It seems the lawyer had negotiated a lease on new office space, only to have his prospective landlord suddenly scrub the deal after learning that he counted the Green River killer as a client.

“But none of that has ever really bothered me much,” says Lindell. “If you’re in this line of work and such things bother you . . . well, you really ought to find another line of work.”

Seventy-five-year-old Anthony Savage, who has spent the last half-century defending accused criminals in Seattle and elsewhere, agrees that the public sometimes misunderstands the role defense attorneys play. Yet he says there is less confusion on this score today than in times past.

“I think it has greatly improved over the last 25 or 30 years,” says Savage. “We’ve now had two generations of people who grew up with L.A. Law and Law & Order and Hawaii Five-O and all of these TV programs in which criminal prosecution is central to the plotting. And I think that, as a consequence, the public understands better than they did, say, 40 years ago, that just because you are representing an alleged serial killer, that doesn’t mean you endorse serial killings.”

Still, tales are told of criminal defense lawyers — and even their families — bearing the brunt of public ire over particularly egregious atrocities committed by the attorneys’ clients. Browne remembers defending Martin Pang, who was accused in 1995 of deliberately setting fire to his parents’ wooden warehouse in Seattle’s International District, hoping to collect the insurance money and clear the property for development. That blaze resulted in the deaths of four firefighters. It also led to Browne’s young son, Eli, being harassed at school.

Recalls Browne: “He had people calling him up and saying, ‘Your dad’s representing that disgusting person [Pang]. How could he?’” And it wasn’t Browne’s family alone that fielded the complaints. “My ex-law partner, Allen Ressler, who lived on Vashon Island, would once in a while do things for me on that case, while I was out of town [often in Brazil, to which Pang had fled],” Browne explains. “But his daughters got so much crap because of it, that he refused to do anything more for Martin.” (Pang eventually pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter, and with Browne’s assistance, escaped a death sentence, receiving a 30-year prison term in its place.) Even today, visitors to Browne’s offices on the 21st floor of the art deco Exchange Building must wait to be buzzed through the front doors, for security’s sake.

If popular scorn weren’t difficult enough to bear, such high-profile “counsels for the damned,” as they’re sometimes dubbed in the press, must occasionally suffer threats from their own clients. Savage tells about defending one particularly volatile 40-year-old man, Matthew Bolar, accused of shooting his ex-girlfriend’s lover to death, who during his trial in 2000 got so mad at Savage, he threatened to poke the attorney’s eye out with a sharp pencil. For his own protection, Savage recruited a beefy member of the sheriff ’s staff (“He made King Kong look puny”) to sit quietly between him and Bolar at the defense table. And, to further increase his odds of survival, Savage gave his client a felt-tipped pen. (The case, which Savage’s partner, John Hicks, said “would try the patience of a medieval saint,” ended in a 41-year prison sentence for Bolar.)

So why do these otherwise sensible legal practitioners continue going to bat for the Ridgways, Bolars and Pangs of the world? Lindell confesses that he likes the competition. “The practice of law is one of the few areas where you can still have a winner and a loser. If you lose, your client goes to prison; when you win, your client goes home to his family.”

Savage asserts that he and his colleagues are performing an essential public service by defending even the most reprehensible malcontents. “I try to philosophize that the law doesn’t only allow us to do this, but it in fact commands that we do it,” he says. “If you look at the Sixth Amendment, it says the defendant ‘shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial.’ It’s not permissible, it’s mandatory.”

Browne says working headline-grabbing cases can be seductive — but it can also be “very, very destructive to some people.” Again, he knows from personal experience: A 1998 Seattle Times profile told of how Browne, at the height of his early success, partied a bit too much before trying to restore some equilibrium to his life through yoga and the poetry of 13th-century Sufi spiritual master Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.

Developing inner calm and objectivity is helpful for this line of work.

David Allen, of the Seattle firm Allen, Hansen & Maybrown, insists attorneys must look beyond personal revulsion at the acts their clients may have committed, and focus instead on “the presumption of innocence.”

“Everybody’s presumed to be innocent, until proven guilty,” says Allen, who has defended such notorious figures as Spokane’s “South Hill Rapist,” Kevin Coe, and Charles Momah, the South Seattle obstetrician-gynecologist who was convicted in November 2005 of sexually harassing and assaulting some of his female patients. “So if somebody comes in, I don’t care how strong the evidence is against him or her, if they say they are innocent, they’re innocent in my book. Or, if they say they’re guilty, but they want to fight the case, then they have a right to do that. They don’t have a right to take the stand and lie, but the Constitution says we can put the government to their proof, and I feel very strongly about that principle.”

Besides, Allen notes, “mistakes are made; evidence can be proven wrong. If anybody needs a lesson in that, they can look at all of the DNA cases that are now getting reversed, or look back at the [Steve] Titus case.” Titus was a bearded, 31-year-old Seattle man accused of raping a 17-year-old girl on a secluded road just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in October 1980. The evidence seemed to be against Titus; he failed a polygraph test before his trial, and the victim identified him as her assailant. A jury convicted him after 12 hours of deliberation. Titus was at the brink of prison, when another suspect was found. With the help of a Seattle Times reporter, the case was ultimately dismissed, but Titus himself died of a heart attack weeks before his lawsuit against Port of Seattle police, handled by Allen and colleague Richard Hansen, was to begin.

The client

Among the discoveries one makes in speaking with attorneys who handle high-profile criminal cases is how different their impressions of their clients can be from those reached by the public. Browne, for example, describes Ted Bundy as “one of the few sociopaths I have represented in my life who actually knew he was a bad person. When I was defending him, he looked up to me at one point — I’ll never forget this — and he said, ‘John, I want to be a good person, I’m just not.’ ”

Meanwhile, Allen contends Momah suffered in the jury’s eyes because he was foreign-born and severely overweight — “If somebody looks handsome or pretty, or height-weight proportionate, they do much, much better in court.” Allen casts Momah as, for the most part, “a very humble, bright, engaging, and intelligent individual. . . . He had a photographic memory, and was a very easy person to work with.”

And while Savage acknowledges that some accused murderers, such as his client David Lewis Rice, the right-wing extremist given a life sentence for slaying civil-rights attorney Charles Goldmark and his family during the Christmas of 1985, can have “genuine mental problems,” he describes Gary Ridgway as “a very dull, unassuming individual. Here’s a guy who confessed to, what, 48 murders, and he’s probably responsible for another 50. Yet you would never have sensed anything violent about him. In all the years that I represented him . . . I think I heard him yell once. Otherwise, he was very soft-spoken and not very interesting.”

After defending not only Bundy and Pang, but also Benjamin Ng, convicted in 1983 of 13 aggravated-murder counts associated with the Wah Mee Massacre — still Washington’s worst mass murder — Browne thinks he’s finally figured out what distinguishes his worst clients from the balance of humanity. “It’s the absolute absence of any notion that we are all somehow connected,” he says. “And it’s my job to get that point across to the jury.”

Like his professional colleagues, though, Browne can’t save every one of his high-profile defendants. That fact haunts him, not only because of the cases he’s lost — including that of Darrell Cloud, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 1995 for killing a Seattle middle-school teacher who’d sexually abused him — but even because of some he’s won. He recalls, from his long-ago days as a Seattle public defender, the instance of a Lakota Sioux man (“a wonderful person, though he’d become a skid-road alcoholic”) who, in order to get a bottle of wine, had slit the throat of another Native American. “It’s amazing, but I got the judge in that case . . . to give my client a year in alcoholic rehabilitation and probation,” Browne says. “And he did really well for about a year, year and a half. But then he did the same thing all over again.”

Remarkably, while rampant media exploitation of made-for-the-tabloids crimes can turn the general public cynical about the innate decency of their fellow human beings, attorneys who represent some of the nastiest criminals don’t necessarily buy into that cynicism.

“As naïve as it may sound,” says Eric Lindell, “I think people are fundamentally good. They might be accused of doing bad things, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad people. In a lot of these cases you’re talking about — the heinous cases — I still found good in the people I represented. And some of them are very sympathetic. . . . Some of them I have had great compassion for. Actually, most of them I have wound up having great compassion for.”

In the end, says Browne, the best an attorney can do for some high-profile criminal clients is aid them in understanding the consequences of their acts. “There are times when I sit with people, and I know I can’t help them, except to listen to them — which is something some people never have in their whole lives.” He pauses, then adds: “You know, there’s a good reason why attorneys are sometimes called ‘counselors.’”