Gerry Spence: The Country-Smart Wyoming Lawyer
GERRY SPENCE, the lawyer, was born in Laramie, Wyoming in 1929 and has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming for most of his adult life, near gorgeous mountains, grizzly bears and bald eagles, moose, bison and elk. He is semi-retired these days but that’s understandable since he’s 95 years old. He will not completely retire because he still feels the need to seek for justice.
Spence had his first famous legal victory in the Karen Silkwood case. Silkwood was a corporate whistle-blower who died mysteriously in 1974. Spencer ran the legal team that in 1979 sued the Kerr-McGee Company. Most observers thought Spence had little chance of getting money for Silkwood’s radiation exposure when the cause of her death was a car crash, but Spence won Silkwood’s father and her children 10.5 million dollars
Spence has also defended a motley assortment of others: Miss Wyoming against Bob Guccione and Penthouse magazine; Imelda Marcos; and Randy Weaver. Imelda Marcos certainly seemed to have committed fraud and racketeering, but Spence got her cleared of all charges. Penthouse would seem to have been within its rights to print a short piece of fiction about a Miss Wyoming who levitated men through exotic sexual rituals — but in 1978 Spence helped Miss Wyoming win a $26.5 libel judgment against Penthouse.
Spence defended Thomas Cummings and the bankrupt Central Ice Cream Company in its dispute with the McDonald’s restaurant chain — and got a 52 million dollar judgment against McDonald’s. He’s won a series of multi-million dollar verdicts for his clients. Between 1969–2010 Spence never lost a civil case, and he’s never lost a criminal case.
And he made lawyering look fun. He had a loyal and interesting wife, Imogene Spence, and at least two huge ranches.
Spence lived in Sheridan and various Wyoming towns as a boy, graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1949, and from its law school in 1952. He was a small-town lawyer in Riverton, Wyoming and from 1954–1962 the prosecuting attorney of Fremont County. He once ran unsuccessfully for Congress, and spent some years as a defense lawyer for the insurance industry.
At one point, he decided to forget practicing law, moved out to San Francisco and studied painting. But he came back to Wyoming and to the law. Spence was a natural in the courtroom: smart, intuitive, with a great deep, resonant voice. The words and the voice together put you at ease. Jurors said it was almost like a drug to hear Gerry Spence talk.
He always had an instinctive feel for juries, what sort of things they care about, the way they sift evidence, and how to influence them without making them feel manipulated. He knew juries want to feel they are too smart to be fooled and that they want to protect their own value systems.
He perfected the art of appearing to be a simple country lawyer. He wore western vests with leather fringes. He could describe the sun coming up over the Tetons at dawn, the rich glow on the peaks he’d seen as he rode to the airport for the first flight of the day on Frontier Air Lines, and he’d make you feel sorry for Gerry Spence, who really just wanted to sit in a rocking chair and take in the morning sun.
Only later would you think, ‘Wait a minute. He CHOSE this life. He loves to fly out of Jackson Hole and whip some big city lawyer.’
At some point, Spence decided he was no longer comfortable representing the powerful. He wanted to represent the poor, the injured and the forgotten in their fight against big corporations and big government. He took on car companies, and the FBI. He likes to say, “The FBI method for taking DNA evidence is atrocious.” He believes that many police procedures are shoddy even when followed to the letter, and notes that very often they are not followed to the letter.
He said: “I want cases that have meaning.”
In 1995, when O.J. Simpson was tried for the killing of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Spence hoped at first that this trial of a famous American could be “a marvelous civics lesson” for America. Americans hooked on the trial could learn some of the intricacies of the laws and Constitutional amendments governing “searches and seizures.”
But what Spence felt would have been a one-week trial if the defendant hadn’t been so rich and famous, ground on and on, and Spence ended up feeling that justice looked in the O.J. Trial like any other expensive commodity in America: it could be bought but only for a very high price.
When people asked Gerry Spence if he thought O.J. Simpson was guilty, he would say ‘No, I don’t — and neither must you or anyone else who has not examined all the facts presented to them by the defense.’ The right of every U.S. citizen’ to be considered innocent until proven guilty has always been sacred to Gerry Spence.
He would remind people it’s a bedrock of ancient Roman law, of common law, of civil law and of international law.
If a person had a past history of violence, Spence would nod gravely, and say in that calm bass voice: ‘We are the most violent of all the species… but that says nothing at all about what happened in this case.’
He was sure he could look into the eyes of his client, ask them probing questions and, from their face and body language, read a great deal about what that client was like.
He prepared methodically, then made his case simply, using bluff and intimidation where he could, but mostly playing it straight.
He would make a canny guess whether the prosecution was sticking entirely to facts which they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. If the prosecution made an air-tight but circumstantial case, Spence acted surprised, even appalled, that the prosecutors would hound the defendant, and waste the jury’s time, with such a circumstantial case.
But if the prosecutors tried to go even slightly beyond what they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt, Spence acted appalled by THAT. How did this witness ever get from here all the way over to THERE in such a short time? This is rampant speculation.
Spence’s voice would slow, and his big right index finger would point. He would explain that the rules of the law clearly state that no witness has the right to guess, estimate or speculate. The witness can only testify to what he or she KNOWS. And if any witness speculates from the witness stand, that — right there — creates a reasonable doubt about the guilt of the defendant.
And at least some of the jury would start to think, ‘There’s reasonable doubt, all right.’
If a search by the prosecution found evidence that was very damaging to his client, Spence acted as if the only issue worth discussing was whether or not the search had been done perfectly correctly. If the search was done perfectly correctly, Spence would ignore that and act as if the only issue was whether or not the prosecutors had embellished one or two of their conclusions.
He was very good at establishing rapport with juries. Everybody agreed on that, from his defense lawyer friends to the District Attorneys on the other side. The prosecutors who tangled with him often implied that he cozied up to the jury with smoke and mirrors, with folksy-slick lawyer’s tricks.
Spence indignantly denied it. He’ compare talking to a jury during a criminal case to a man walking into a forest, and deep in the middle of it finding 12 good people, lost. And it’s that man’s job to convince those 12 lost people, the jury, that he can guide them safely out of that forest.
Well, you don’t do that with smoke and mirrors, and tricks, Spence would say. You do that by showing sound judgment and being trustworthy. Little by little, you lead those lost people out from a wilderness of contradictory testimony to the freedom that comes from seeing things clearly for the first time.
He was very good at knocking expert testimony for its jargon, for being too intellectual and technical for normal people to respect and understand. Again and again, Spence told juries in his deep, resonant voice that underhanded people will develop a special vocabulary with which they try to hide their chicanery. But Spence would say ‘The law is really about people — you and me — and how we should be treated.’
The jury would nod. They didn’t like expert jargon, either, and they would start to discount the damning expert testimony
At a crucial moment, Spence might take off his glasses, and drop his voice almost to a whisper.
The Trial Lawyers College which Gerry Spence founded in Dubois, Wyoming trained trial lawyers in an unusual way. There was no television or Internet service there, and he was delighted that cell phone reception there was lousy because Spence wanted his trial lawyer pupils to let go of all that, of the outside influences, to “break down internal barriers.”
Then he had each trial lawyer student make a painting. What does painting have to do with being a skillful trial lawyer? Quite a bit, he insists. A painting and an argument to the jury both have a beginning, a middle and an end; both have form, content and controlled beauty. He told his students to think of their presentation to the jury as a painting.
He always resisted being on a defense “team,” never wanting to share the work and the speeches to the jury with other defense lawyers. He thought of that in painting terms, too. A painter might take advice from another painter about what colors to use, or what kind of brush strokes. The advice might even be quite useful. “But don’t take the paint brush from my hand.”
Spence considered himself a serious photographer and a poet, and he published 12 books. Some were quickies with titles like “How to Argue & Win Your Case Every Time” but he also wrote a searing book called “Police State: How America’s Cops Get Away With Murder.” Prosecutors begged to differ; they probably thought Spence should have written a memoir called “How I Help My Clients Get Away With Murder.”
In 2008, he represented another lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger. Fieger had been the litigious lawyer for the notorious assisted suicide man, Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Many people saw Geoffrey Fieger as an ambulance-chasing lawyer if ever there was one, a walking, talking argument for tort reform. The man was brash.
But Gerry Spence would respond in his measured way, in that deeply soothing voice, that there is nothing illegal about being brash. Spence freely conceded that Geoffrey Fieger made wealthy industries yearn for tort reform. Spence would then add that OF COURSE major industries in this country would love to do away with successful lawyers — because those lawyers are the only ones who know how to call the major industries on the crimes they commit, and to make them pay dearly for the damage they cause.
The government indicted Geoffrey Fieger for illegally funneling $127,000 to the 2004 Presidential campaign of John Edwards. No one in Wyoming, and no trial-watcher anywhere, was surprised when Spence managed to get Fieger acquitted of all the charges.
They WERE surprised when Gerry Spence then announced: “This is my last case… It’s time for me to quit, to put down the sword.”