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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good Evening. Internationally known legal ethics professor Richard Zitron's work as a trial lawyer placed him on the front lines of fighting systemic racism, pervasive elitism, and injustice against individuals in the legal system. In Trial Lawyer, he shares details of the most compelling case he's encountered and exposes the dilemmas he's faced throughout his one of a kind career. The profound, the consequential, the shocking, the bizarre, and even
the humorous. Trial Lawyer brings to life what it means to represent people against power. From his first case as a young law student on the famous and highly politicized San Quentin sixth case, and throughout his forty year career, Zitron has worked on dozens of cases that underscore the inherent biases of the legal system towards people of color, the poor, the less educated, and those who just don't appear to fit the mold of whatever society considers normal.
His personal stories about him bring the reader inside the courtroom to experience a unique cast of characters, strange but true facts, brilliant trial tricks and tactics, and not so brilliant ones that failed miserably. Each had its own lessons about social justice, fairness, strategy, ethics, morality and more. The book that we're featuring this evening is Trial Lawyer, A Life representing People Against Power, with my special guest, attorney
and author Richard Zitrin. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Richard Zitrin.
Thank you for having me, Dan, thank you so much.
Very very fascinating story and quite unique for this program. Let's talk about what you write. In the introduction, you said that this is a book of reflections on the most compelling cases that you have encountered during your life as a trial lawyer. Tell us what most of these cases consist of and what you found about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.
Well, Dan, most of the cases I did after the first one that you mentioned, we're ordinary cases that didn't get an awful lot of publicity. Some got some, but not a lot necessarily, But they had extraordinary features, bizarre things that occur, surprises that occurred in the courtroom, sudden changes in defense, tactics for sudden changes and prosecute, some factics, surprised witnesses, all kinds of unique and unusual things that happen.
And as a storyteller and as someone who's written a few other books, I was encouraged by people to tell my own personal story. So this started out as kind of a memoir about these cases, But as I got more deeply into it, given my background asm with legal ethics professor for forty years, it wound up being a lot about how to deal with disadvantaged people, people who haven't had a fair shot in the system, and also how to deal with my own sense of my own responsibilities to my clients.
You write about that responsibility that it supersedes all others. Explain further, Well, we have what we.
Call a fiduciary duty. It's a term that's used mostly with finance banks and so on, but lawyers have a fiduciary duty to their clients, and it's simply to put the interests of the clients ahead of their own interests, and that's not necessarily easy to do. Sometimes it's hard to figure out where your own interests stop and the
client's interests begin. But the main thing that I learned from the very first day I was practicing law was that my obligation was to put my client's interests first and try to protect that client before worrying about myself. It's a basic principle of ethical lawyery.
You say that it's especially important when it appears that the system is being unfair to a client, doesn't it.
Well, that's true, and my experience has been largely with clients for whom the system did not give them an even break. A lot of times that's because they were poor. A lot of times they were people of color or other people disadvantaged by the system, or, as I suggested, people who just don't fit what the society as a
whole considers normal or ordinary behavior. And those people have a much tougher row to hoe than the average person who doesn't have those handicap So there's a special responsibility that I felt for many many of my clients along the way, because they weren't getting the fair shot that other people might get you.
Also in this book address when it comes to criminal cases. There have been two questions that you've been asked more than any others. What are those two questions and what are your answers to those two questions?
Well, the first one is how can you represent people if you know that they're guilty? I think both questions actually get subsumed and put together in that single question, how can you represent people if you know that they're guilty? And the reason is that, of course, everybody is entitled to defend, and nobody is guilty until really a jury comes back in and says So there are all kinds of circumstances relating to a case that are extenuating circumstances
that explained the situation. So that in one case that I had very early in my career, man named Elvin Drummond killed another man, but it was in self defense, so was he guilty. He had committed a homicide, but that's not a crime. He hadn't committed a murder. In the San Quentin sixth case which you mentioned, Dan, the underlying facts inside the lockdown of a major United States prison were so unfathomable that no one could really ascertain what happened, and to this day, no one really knows
what happened. So to assume that somebody is guilty because they're accused, or maybe even because there's an extraordinary amount of evidence, only tells part of the story. Now there's another reason here. Our system grew out of the system that existed in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. And at that time they had star chambers in England in which the accused would be told by the judge that even if the jury found them not guilty, the
judge was finding them guilty. And in one case, involving William Penn, one of the found Pennsylvania, the jury was told that if they didn't come back with a guilty verdict, they too would be thrown in prison. That's not the kind of system we wanted in the United States, and so to a certain extent, we reacted against that by creating rights to people who are accused of crimes, so that nobody is convicted of the crime unless a jury finds that they're guilty.
Well, your extraordinary legal career, and we're talking about in this book, your first murder case, and you'd only been a lawyer for three years. So tell us how you came to be working with David Mayer, and how you came to represent Johnny Spain, and how you came to work on the San Quentin sixth case.
I had come out to San Francisco to do my third year of law school, and I have been out here a week when a friend of mine told me that he had just turned down a job with a fellow named David Mayer working a highly publicized sixth murder case in San Quentin State Prison. And he recommended that I go up an interview with David, and he and I hit it off, and David hired me on the
spot to be a law clerk on the case. I was paid five dollars an hour by the Marin County Superior Court, since the county which San Quentin is located. Of course, five dollars an hour was more then than it is now, but it still wasn't very much money.
David turned out to be a great mentor, a very very dedicated lawyer, former defense, a former prosecutor down in southern California who had gone into the Air Force and seen the difficulty that accused people had of getting a fair shake in their court rooms in court martials, and it kind of revolutionized him and turned him into a
defense lawyer. When he got out of the Air Force, instead of going back to the DA's office, he decided to come up to northern California and start defending people, including a lot of people in San Quentin State Prison.
Based on that, he got a reputation, and so people that were in prison were talking and so they're one of the defendants asked for him to be appointed his lawyer. What happened in that regard, Yes, he.
Had gotten a reputation for doing a great job representing prisoners. One of the San Quentin six named Willie Tate, reached out to David and said, I'd like to have you appointed to represent me in this case. And David presented that request to the judge in the case, whose name was Henry Broderick. Broderick was not very fond of the San Quentin sixth defendants. He saw them as guilty people.
He also frankly saw them as six people of color who were not common in his own personal experience, and so he pulled a fast one on David and appointed him, but not to represent Willie Tate instead to represent Johnny Spain, who was the only member of the Black Panther Party among the six defendants that got Johnny and David off to the wrong foot, a situation that had been created frankly by the trial genants.
So he was assigned this case or appointed this case. It was far more difficult with what the judge and prosecutor felt was the most guilty of the sixth defendants.
Well, Johnny was the one most closely associated with George Jackson, who was a leader of the Black Panther Party and was killed himself on the day in which the San Quan sixth violence occurred. And there was a history to that violence that I can explain briefly if you would
like me to. Absolutely started in early nineteen seventy, George Jackson had been a sent to Salidad Prison, where he came under the tutelage of an inmate named W. L. Nolan, who was one of the founders of radical black prison groups. One day in January of nineteen seventy, a guard shot into the yard at Solidad Prison, which is down near Monterey, and killed three black inmates. And when the grand jury examined the situation. They exonerated the guard from all three shootings.
About two weeks later, a guard was thrown from the tier tiers or the stories of the cells that exist the usually three or four or five tiers that are like apartment floors, was thrown from the third floor tier into the yard and was killed, and Jackson and two other people were accused of killing that guard in retribution for the killing of Nolan. Those three became known as
the Salidad Brothers. After that time, Jackson was sent to San Quentin and eventually the events of August twenty first, nineteen seventy one occurred, which Jackson was killed by guards
and five other people in the interim. In August of nineteen seventy after the accusation against Jackson and the other two Salidad brothers, Jackson's seventeen year old brother invaded the Marin County courthouse, went into a courtroom with guns, kidnapped a judge and a district attorney, and left and outside the courtroom when they got into their car, there was a shootout. Three of the invaders were killed, including purege,
Jackson's brother Jonathan, and the judge was also killed. So this created an atmosphere of extraordinary fear and concern in the community, both law enforcement community and also the African American community and the other communities of color in and around San Quentin State Prison. And it was in that environment that a year later the San Quentin sixth case arose and six people were killed.
You're right that there's a little more involved too, because the gun that Jonathan used Jackson used was found to be purchased by Angela Davis, who had been fired from UCLA but for being a communist, then was reinstated, then refired for inflammatory language such as calling cops pigs, and so a couple months after this incident, Angela Davis was charged with murder, wasn't she?
That's right? And Angela Davis by that time had already become extremely well known because of her outspoken statements at both Berkeley and then later on at UCLA, And she had been terminated by UCLA, which was then reversed by the courts. So she was already very well known. And when it was found that the guns were supposedly purchased by Angela Davis, this was a front page event. She was accused of murder along with one prisoner who was in that car where people died, who survived, and she
became a fugitive for a period of time. She was soon and quite soon thereafter put on trial and was acquitted of all charges.
Let's get back to working with David Mayer on this case and this all the lessons that you did learn, all the work that you did do on their behalf, well.
I've got to tell you, Dan, maybe the most single, most extraordinary day I had in the law was the day I first went out to San Quentin to meet Johnny Spain. I had no idea what to expect. I had never been in a prison before. I think I had only been into jail once or twice, and the security of the prison was extraordinarily high in light of these homicides. We were brought into a tiny little visiting room that was about the size of two phone booths
back to back. Separating us was a plastic shield impenetrable field that went all the way down to about two inches above a little narrow table. Johnny sat on one side of this and we sat on the other, and you couldn't even hear clearly. The sound was muffled by
the thick plastic an extraordinary thing happened. David extended his fingers, the tips of his fingers under the metal grid that was at the bottom of the plastic, and Johnny extended his fingers and they shook hands by shaking their fingers together with each other. That was the only way of doing it. And then I did the same thing. It was really extraordinary thing that there was such a separation between our ability to connect with our clients in a
meaningful way. While we were in those rooms, we frequently didn't talk because there was a sand point and guard sitting two feet behind Johnny listening to everything we said it. So we would often take ballpoint pens and scribble what we were saying to the person we were talking to, pass the note in the little space between the partition and the table, and once the note had been read,
we'd take the note back and scribble over. It would depend in circular emotions and no one could possibly read it. It was the only way we felt we could have a confidential communication with our own client. And to me, being a kind of white suburban kid from a relatively privileged background, it was just such an eye opener. I think I was in shop.
You're right, that also you were It was like an otherworldly experience when you say that, the extent of the animosity towards the defense team.
Oh, yes, We would get there at nine o'clock in the morning and put in a visiting slip for Johnny. Now, these guys were all locked down in a place called the Adjustment Center, which was the most highly secure area at that time, the most highly secure California prison, sam Quentin. They were locked down for at least twenty three and a half hours a day, and sometimes for more than that. They got showers only two days a week. They had no ability to visit anybody other than their legal team.
And we were told, nevertheless, when we got there at nine o'clock and asked to be able to visit with him, that for one reason or another, there was no escort to bring him too the visiting room, or he was busy doing something else, or he was taking a shower, or there was no availability of crew at the adjustment center to bring him over to where we were. And sometimes we waited for three or four hours, cooling our heels in the visiting room before we even got to
see it. That was pretty typical the animosity that we received was palpable. It's beyond my belief to even consider the animosity that the sixth defendants were facing.
You're right that you began everything with to learn all the relevant facts by reading transcripts from the first court appearances in nineteen seventy one, and also that you've learned of the prosecution's theory of what they believe had happened and the charges subsequently.
Right, Well, there was an indictment. It was three hundred and sixty eight pages long, and it described the narrative of what supposedly happened, and then there were transcripts at the first couple of hearings, after which the case was suspended or stayed by the appellate courts, and it was stayed until from October of nineteen seventy one until just before I arrived on the scene in June of nineteen seventy three. The transcript of the grand jury presented a
very convoluted and somewhat unbelievable theory. And the theory was this, a white lawyer from a privileged background, in fact, from a family of Connecticut senators and congresspeople and stuff like that, named Stephen Bingham, supposedly put a Spanish World War two gun called an astra into a small tape recorder that he brought inside San Quentin Prison to visit Johnny Spain,
to visit George Jackson. Supposedly, according to the prosecution, somehow the gun got transmitted to Jackson in the visiting room, and Jackson supposedly hit the gun under a wig that he was wearing, and after a wig that he was wearing, and took it with two clips that would be inserted into the gun back to the adjustment center after the interview, and when he entered the adjustment center, according to the prosecution's case, the guards looked at him. Most of them
didn't see anything wrong. One ran his fingers through Jackson's wig and didn't see anything. When all of a sudden, again according to the guards, he pulled out the gun, pulled off the wig with one hand, pulled out the gun with his second hand, and with what appeared to be his third hand, according to logical movement common sense, placed the clip inside the gun and said, this is it.
The dragon has come REDI and we analyzed it and looked at all the testimony from everybody who testified at the grand jury, and This just didn't make a hell of a lot of sense, and it seemed possible that the events could have occurred in the way that was being described by the prison, and there was a great feeling among the sixth defendants that also, I must say many and most of the lawyers soon agreed with that the prison had set up George Jackson in light of
the Solidad case in which he was accused of murdering the guard and was thrown from the tier, and that the idea behind this event was to kill George Jackson in a fake attempt by George Jackson to escape from the adjustment sentence, and that what happened was that it got out of hand.
You're right that he's charged with conspiracy without them specifying who was actually murdered and who was actually all involved in the conspiracy to murder.
Well, one of the things that I've focused on very early on in the cases, I was put in charge doing a motion to dismiss the indictment because we couldn't tell who Johnny Spain was in conspiracy with, that these six were conspiring with people or person or persons unknown. How do you defend somebody if they're conspiring with people, and they're not telling you who the people are. So our argument was we were not put on notice of
what their case was really about. They were saying, these six people did various bad things, or maybe they didn't do them themselves, but other people with whom they were conspiring may have killed the five people who were to kill that day in San Quentin, other than George Jackson. But they weren't telling us who the people were. So our question was put in Layman's terms, this, how the hell can we defend Johnny Spain if he's accused of conspiring with a killer and they're not telling us who
they think the killer is. And yet that's the way the Caps ultimately went to Trump, can.
You explain the de mirror and its role.
What we did with the information that we had is we filed what's called a demur which is a legal creed cleaning that attacks the indictment itself, and the demurr was based on this. You have not provided us notice in this indictment of how we can possibly defend the case by not telling us who the co conspirators are. You're not giving us notice in a way that makes it fair for us to be able to defend our clients in this case Johnny's spain. But it was true
of all six of the clients. And this was really a great lesson to me about unfairness. I had grown up with unfairness. I had grown up seeing and understanding something about the unfairness that people of color faced, the racism that black people faced, the harder road it was for black people to travel, and Indigenous people and other people of color. But I had no clue as to
the extent of the unfairness. And this was basically a case in which a prosecution was trumped up by a claiming that these six men had conspired with people that they weren't going to name. So our emotion was a de murder to set aside the indictment completely because it failed to provide us notice of how to defend the case. I thought it was righteous, but needless to say, we lost, and we lost pretty much every motion that we tried.
One motion that you felt was very, very important, and you talk about it in the introduction right away, about the chaining of the defendants in court, and this whole elaborate handcuffing and chaining explained well.
First, Dan let me explain the way the chains worked. So when they were brought to court the sixth, and in fact when they were brought to visits in the prison, each of the six including Johnny, had leg chain running between their legs, attached with ankle braces. They also had a waist chain around their waist, and attached to the waist chain was a short six or eight inch chain
that went to handcuffs. So there was a chain around their waist and a short chain on each side going to each of two handcuffs, so that they could not extend their arms far enough really to even write notes to us without leaning their whole body over and with their arm constricted by the eight inches, be able to try to write something to us. In addition to that, they also had neck braces that they had to wear. The chains and braces that they had to wear. The
court weighed twenty six pounds. When we were working on motions about the law, the demurder, the lack of evidence, the ambiguity of the indictment, the sixth defendants were most
concerned about emotion that they called the unshackling motion. They were most concerned about the chains, And I got to be the lead person in writing that motion because they felt that with all these chains twenty six pounds of weight, that they could not honestly communicate with their own lawyers, because the chains were so restricted that they could neither sit up right in the courtroom, nor could they communicate. And they barely could write by virtue of the waste
chains that were attached to the handcuffs. And you know, I was in that courtroom many many many days, and I saw those chains, and they were absolutely right. We asked the judge to make specific findings as to why the chains were necessary, and the judge merely, these guys are coming over from the adjustment center in San Quentin, the most violent place in the entire state prison system, and I'm going to keep them changed in the court.
And no inquiry was really held to determine whether the chains weren't necessary, whether the chains have been removed, would the defendants have acted out, or whether they would have simply sat there and be able to assist their attorneys. We lost that motion too.
Tell us about Judge Stole and his actions regarding these chains.
Well along the way, my mentor David Mayer had an idea to file a motion to set aside the grand jury indictment based on the fact that the grand jury was not a jury of our client's peers. They were very white, they were very upper middle class. There was no diversity, There was no economic diversity. So David filed this motion saying that the grand jury was not a fair constitution of the population of Marin County as a whole, which did have some poorer areas nobody represented on the Grandeur.
We didn't really think we were going to win that motion, but the motion had the effect of requiring the entire Superior Court of Marin County to remove itself from the case because they had selected the grand jury and therefore were ineligible to rule on its viability. So they brought in a judge from Nevada County, an old, retired, white
haired fello named Vernon Stole. It must have been seventy five years old at least, and we thought, oh my god, Nevada County, you know, conservative territory, old white hair judge, or are we in a mess of trouble? But when he got on the bench, the sixth complained, as they did at the beginning of every single hearing in the court, that the chains on them were too tight, and unlike what Judge Broderick had done, Judge Stole did something extraordinary.
He got up from the bench and he walked down to the well of the court room where the sixth defendants were seated, and he examined their leg chains and their handcuffs personally. And then he turned to the sand Quentin guards who were watching them, and said, you need to loosen these handcuffs and loosen these chains. And if he had done nothing else, he had earned the respect of each one of those six defendments because he was treating them the first time they were ever treated this
way in the courtroom. He was treating them by human beings.
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of proceedings again stay of this trial. But also you write next about the issue of segregation, right, and.
In this case, segregation means what they call on the prison system administrative segregation, which is basically isolation being taced in isolation. So in the adjustment center there were two tiers. One looked out on a set of windows. One looked out absolutely nothing. The people with the set of windows were able to go outside once in a while. The people where Johnny Spain and the other six had no way of going outside, so there was no outside exercise.
These people in segregation suffered, among other things, that they had a half hour of exercise a day, which when it wasn't convenient, they didn't get that. If they had a shower day two days a week, they didn't get their exercise. When they were removed from a cell. Tear gas was routinely used. When they had personal family visits, they were limited to one per week. The cell floors had no drainings and they frequently flooded because of four pipes.
Overflowing toilets were typical. They had no TV, they had no radio, They had no academic make or vocational study, and they had two separate script cells as they were called, which were reserved for people who misbehaved, which had no wash basin and only a hole in the floor for waste elimination as they called it, and a single two hundred watt bull controlled from outside the cell. These conditions were things that Johnny and I and the other six
talked about all the time. They were horrific, and I was tasked near the end of the case to do a rid of habeas corpus petition regarding the conditions of confinement. Habeas corpus bring the body before the court here not to free the person, but to say these conditions of confinement are unconstitution and cruel and unusual punishment, And indeed they were. I can't imagine how any degree of sady should have been maintained by these six individuals and the
other people incarcerated did there under these conditions. And eventually, after the case itself, Judge Alfonso'serve the Northern District of California Federal Court agreed and declared most of these conditions unconstitutional and required changes such as outside time and exercise every single day, and many other changes that made life a little bit more palatable for people in segregation.
You say that this case, Judge Stole's decision was eventually overturned, but Johnny succeeded in getting Charles Gary to be his counsel and David Mayer was relieved of his duties. But during the hiatus in the case, you spent a lot of time with Charles Gary, and he offered you to co chair or be the second chair on the upcoming trial. What was your decision and why?
Well, first, Judge Stole not only did he loosen the handcuffs, but then he did something really incredible. He threw out the indictment and agreed with our theory that grand jury was not And at that point there was a break in the action and Charles Gary who Johnny had wanted to represent them. Chris John Charles had represented Huey Newton in a number of other political figures, and he had this residual suspicion about David because Judge Broderick had foisted
David on. John Charles was interested in taking over the case, and I spent a lot of time with Charles during this period of time, talking about the case, hanging out in his office just off of Market Street in San Francisco, and learning a lot about radical lawyer from Charles and his partners Barney Dreyfus and Frank mctierney true the lions of the radical left defense bar When the case started up again, however, I had a lot of doubts whether Charles continued to have the acumen to be able to
win the case. I felt strongly that David would win the case. He was a brilliant trial lawyer. But I thought that Charles had lost quite a bit off of his fastball, and I was concerned that he wasn't as familiar with the underlying facts of the case, those three hundred and sixty eight pages of the indictment that I
was so intimately familiar with. So I had a choice either going to partnership with David Mayer, who said, you know, we've been working great, come on in, you just got scorn in as a lawyer, be my law partner and will try to do some criminal cases together. Or second, cheering the case with Charles. And that meant a lot of publicity and a lot of, you know, visibility, but it also meant a lot of heartache, and I was
really concerned that it wouldn't wind up well. And so I chose to leave the San Quentin case and go into partnership with David, which turned out to be a really extrall in decision.
Absolutely. In the epilogue, you decide or pardon me, you discuss. Eventually they went to trial and the longest criminal trial in California history at that time several months. And you write that the jury deliberate deliberations took over one hundred days. Tell us a little bit more transpired.
Well, the jury deliberations were pretty incredible. The prosecution really didn't have much of the case because it was based on the smoke and mirror aspect of conspirators who were unknown, and while we hadn't want emotions about that and the pre trial proceedings, the jury was really troubled by that. So as a result of these long, long deliberations, three of the six defendants were acquitted on every count, and
there was something like fifty felony counts. One of the sixth defendants, named David Johnson, was convicted only of a misdemeanor assault on a guard by kicking the guard and that's it. He was very quickly released from prison on parol. One of the other six, Yogi Panel, was convicted of very serious crimes for cutting the throats of two guards who lived to testify and testify that Yogiell was the
person who had done that. So in this one instance there was direct evidence that this person had committed that crime. Yogi Panell was sentenced to life in prison, which is an appropriate sentence under the law for people who were in those circumstances and committed a crime against a correctional officer and actually lived for very many years and passed
away in prison a few years ago. Johnny Spain. Our client was the only one convicted of murder of two counts of murder, which was pretty bizarre because he was accused of five and there was no claim that he himself had committed the murders, and yet he stood convicted as the sole person convicted of murder. But that was
just the beginning of that issue. He had a wonderful criminal appeals lawyer named Dennis Reardon who had sat with Charles Gary and second chair of the trial, and Dennis twice was able to get a federal judge to overturn
Johnny's conveyed. The second time it was overturned, it was based on the shackling, and Judge Felton Henderson found as we had moved several years before that the trial Judge Roderick had never determined that all of those shackles were necessary, and then having shackled the defendants like this made it impossible for Johnny to truly communicate with his counsel, and there was a lot of evidence about it. There were times when Johnny would say, it's too painful for me
to go to court. I'm going to stay in the prison. There were times when an he wrote letters to the judge saying I'm in such pain in the court I can't communicate with my lawyer. Judge Henderson understood that reversed the convictions showed that there was no grounds for the twenty six pounds of shackling, and at that point Johnny was very soon after least for prison when the prosecution declined to reprosecute it.
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You right about March tenth, nineteen eighty eight, and Johnny walking out of prison in Vacaville, California, parole by order of a Los Angeles judge. Tell us about this meeting. You were there, your wife was there, and others.
Yeah, that was a hell of a great day. Man. He was no longer convicted on the Sam Clinton sixth case, although they haven't yet decided mount to prostitute, but he was still in prison based on his original conviction. In nineteen sixty seven, Dennis and his investigator Kathy Cornbliss did a study showing that everybody in the state prison system convicted of a similar murder at a similar time had already been parole, and yet the parole board continued to
deny Johnny Spain. The only reason could possibly be his San Quentin sixth conviction, but that had been set aside. Dennis went down and found a superior court judge in Los Angeles who was assigned to the case, who ordered the parole board to parole him. Wow, so it wasn't
the parole board, it was a superior court judge. And on that day in March of nineteen eighty eight, we all gathered at the back of Dennis, his young daughter Lisa, me, my young wife Naomi, and a few other friends, and Johnny walked out of Vacaville and got into my car, and there's a there's a picture in the book of me and Johnny hugging at a gas station in Fairfield, California, halfway from Vacaville back to San Francis, where his parole plan was to live in my home, which he did,
wow for several months. And I can tell you how long ago the picture was taken, because pass at that time was a dollar nine cents a gallery. Yeah, yeah, And you can see the joy on our faces as we have. And he came back to San Francisco, he lived and we actually had to have my two year old's room vacated. We gave Johnny that room and got him a telephone, and he came out of prison in nineteen eighty eight, and to this day he's never gone back.
I talked to him last week. He all to wish me a happy birthday, which actually is today, and it's great to have his friendship.
Happy birthday. And you you right about your San Quentin sixth experience having an enormous effect on you. In what ways you believe it changed you really.
Well, I think in a lot of ways I grew up and in fact David grew up in that case. It was necessary, given the political and highly visible nature of that case, and also the equivocal evidence and the really questionable prosecution theory, to file every possible motion on every possible issue, and then to petition for a writ to the higher court on every possible issue. And we did that. We did absolutely everything that possibly could have done, and a few things that we just kind of thought
of ourselves. When we were done, David and I realized that every case should be the San Quentin sixth case, that there would be no reason for any other criminal funding or any civil client with less than that kind of full amount of dedication. And so there we were
kind of stuck with us. We've done absolutely everything in our power, and when the next case came along, and I write about this in the second chapter of the case involving a young Vietnamese kid who was being racially profiled by a bunch of white kids in Brin County, that's exactly what we did. We did the same thing. We pulled out all the stops. We didn't make it easy for the prosecution. We called all the available witnesses and put them on the stand one of the time, David,
and I learned that that's what it takes. So that's what you do.
You also write in this book, and we don't have much time to go into it, but it's interesting that you apply these lessons and what you've learned in the case of Elvin Drummond and self defense. Can you talk about that.
Elvin Drummond was a guy who had been working as a security guard, had very little of a record, which were a black man in the seventies and San Francisco was remarkable. He had one front driving case and he came to us and said, you know, my public defender wasn't a public defender. My private appointed counsel is not doing a good job for me. Will you guys take on the case? And a group of us, six of us took on his case pro bono, and his case
was relatively straightforward. He was accused of murdering a fellow named Bo Molson by stabbing him six times in the chest, and all of the stab wounds were very similar. They were the same depth, the same angle, everything else, so that the coroner concluded that either Elvin had held Bo up against a wall or had stabbed him while Bo was on the ground, but we knew that that didn't happen.
Alvin was a very small man. Both stood six to two and weighed well over two hundred pounds, and Elvin described to us how Bo came after him with a knife and Elvin was able to duck underneath Bou, kind of like Joe Ferraser fighting Muhammad Ali and Boom boom boom boom boom boom. Six stab wounds underneath, all similar. Because Bo Molson was moving towards Elvin at the time.
That's a tough defense. But we absolutely believed Elvin. One of the reasons we believed Alvin was that Bo was Elvin's girlfriend's new guy, and Elvin and the ex girlfriend had a young child, and Elvin was trying to get visitation with the young child. But in doing it he always sought out the Legal Aid Society and got a court order to see the child. He never took the law into his own hands. And this if I made
that is where my mother came. Yes. So my mother, who was an extraordinary woman, an early medical doctor and a psychiatrist and pediatrician, happened to be out in San Francisco, visiting because we had a one year old son at that time. She wanted to see her grandson, and she turned to the trial and she listened to my closing argument. And by that time we had developed a witness who said, no, no, Elvin didn't stab Molston while he was on the ground,
and he didn't hold him up against the building. The two of them were standing there, which supported our theory. But I hadn't nailed it down. And at lunchtime, everybody on our team was telling me what a great job I had, Die Richard, you're really nailing the argument. You're really doing a great job, except for my mom. And my mom said, rich rich listen to me for a second. Okay,
what is it, mom? You have to go back into the jury and when you finish up your argument after lunch, you have to say to them, you have to ask them this question. Is Elvin Drummond the kind of person who would take the law into his own hands? And I thought about that. I said, you know, on the one hand, he always went through legal processes to get the order to visit his daughter, and on the other hand, taking the law into his own hands has the second
meaning using the knife aggressively to commit murder. And so the first thing I did that afternoon and wrapping up my isommation, was to turn to the jury and say, members of the jury, I want you to ask yourself this question. Is Elvin Drummond the kind of man who would take the law into his own hands? And five jurors shook their head no. And I realized my mom through me as the vessel had managed to reach the key of the case.
What was Elvin Drummond's state? And again, who's there to pick him up?
Well, Elvin got out of jail the night of his acquittal because he had no other holes on him, he committed no other crimes. He came to our home and spent the night at our home. But we knew that Bo had two brothers who had actually shown up at the trial, both of whom had violent felony records. Yes, and we're not going to let this go if Elvin
were still around them. So one of the members of this pro bono team of ours had come from Portland, had a lot of contacts in Portland, and we got Elvin a couple of contacts in Portland, Oregon, bout him a bus ticket, told him who to talk to up in Portland and got him out of Dodgs. The bad part of that was that a strange from his daughter, who we really loved, who was an infant. The good part of that is it was able to save its
life at least at that time. About ten years ago, I got a call from this woman and it turned out that she was Elvin's daughter and had managed to get in touch with him, and it continued to be in touch with him after all these years. And that was really really gratifying to hear, because here was a guy who only wanted to spend some time visiting his daughter, has been accused of murder, almost convicted, and then was
able to reunite with his daughter many years later. So every once in a while stories have at least a partial happy ending.
I want to thank you so much Richard Zitrin, for coming on and talking about your book Trial Lawyer, A Life Representing People against Power some of the most compelling cases that you have encountered during your life as a trial lawyer. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about this book. For those that might want to take a look at other works of yours or about this case and more in particular, do you do any social media and do you have a website?
Sure? You can read about this book at www dot Richard Zitron dot com. The Zitron is ZI t R I N. It's got this book featured and the other books that I've written. It also has a number of other published articles. But there's more information about this book and some quotes from some good people who enjoyed it. You know. It's available through my publisher, Political Animal Press. It's available on Amazon and all the other usual places. I have an Instagram account, and I have a Facebook page,
and I have a LinkedIn page. But the best and easiest thing to do is go to my website wwwwichards dot com. I hope you're interested in following up and reading about some of the other stories in addition to the post stories about seven twenty six and all they're done. Thank you Dan so much to ask me about these.
Thank you so much for coming on and discussing trial Lawyer a life representing people against power. Thank you so much for this interview. Richard Zitron. You have a great evening.
Good night. Thank you, Joe, thank you