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Illustration by Ryan Greis
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Artwork representing "Justice"
When a lawyer takes a case, relationships are formed or destroyed, money is won or lost, people live or die. To be effective, the lawyer must stay above the maelstrom of emotion, looking always for the most logical answers. Feelings are best left for closing arguments—and, even then, expressed with restraint. The client doesn’t need the attorney choking up during a deposition or cross-examination. Good lawyers provoke emotions rather than display them. And when the gavel finally drops and the appeals have been exhausted, the lawyer stamps his brown accordion file folder closed and turns his attention to the next problem.
Some clients and cases, however, can’t be forgotten. Like a crime-scene outline made with white paint rather than with white chalk, their imprints linger.
We asked several local lawyers to describe the cases that haunted them long after the file boxes had been sent to storage.
Sudden Violence
Pat Connaghan
Clerk and legal counsel
St. Louis Board of Aldermen
Fifteen years ago, Pat Connaghan was practicing law with his father, the late John Connaghan, at the corner of Wilmington and Grand in South St. Louis. One day, a tall man with dark hair walked in. He had a relatively straightforward problem: He’d been involved in a car accident, lost his temper and flashed a gun. The cops had taken the gun, and he wanted it back.
Connaghan recognized Tom Weston* as one of his older brother’s high-school classmates.
“I talked to the guy, and I thought he was a little odd—I felt like he was hiding something—but he didn’t come across as dangerous,” Connaghan recalls. He took the case.
It wasn’t a complicated matter: All Connaghan had to do was petition for the gun’s return. Because Weston had a gun permit and didn’t have a record, the police department’s lawyer didn’t even object.
When Connaghan showed up for the court hearing, he was handed the gun, wrapped in plastic. “I gave the gun to [Weston], and that was the last I heard,” he says—until two weeks later, when he opened the newspaper and saw his client’s name in bold black headline type.
After getting his gun back, Weston had left Missouri. He was far from home, sitting in his car by the side of the road, when he watched a police officer conduct a routine traffic stop on a passing vehicle. Inexplicably, Weston began shouting at the officers on the scene.
“This police officer just walked up to him to see what was going on and talk to him,” says Connaghan, sounding dazed. “[Weston] pulled out a gun and shot him in the head without any warning.”
Weston was charged with murder and found guilty. He received the death penalty.
For years, Weston waited for his sentence to be carried out. For years, Connaghan checked the state prison system’s death-row website to see whether Weston’s execution had been scheduled, feeling a sense of dread and responsibility for his client’s fate. “He was on death row for a long time,” Connaghan says wearily.
Twelve years after that roadside killing, when his appointed hour finally arrived, Weston reportedly kicked and screamed as he was led down the hall to his execution chamber.
Now, he’s dead. Except in Connaghan’s mind.
Would that police officer still be alive if Connaghan hadn’t filed suit to have Weston’s gun returned?
Would Weston still be alive?
“It was one of those things where every-thing I did was perfectly legal,” Connaghan says. “But it has always bothered me.”
Playing Solomon
Leigh Joy Carson
The Carson Law Firm
“Impossibly cute” and “a little Huck Finn blond” is how Clayton family lawyer Leigh Joy Carson describes 7-year-old Steven*, a boy she was appointed to represent as a guardian ad litem in a hotly contested child-custody case about a dozen years ago.
The parents looked as if they’d stepped straight out of the pages of a Polo ad. They had already separated, and the father, John*, had agreed to let the mother, Alice*, move with their son to Florida. John had quickly realized that the arrangement wasn’t working. Now he wanted Steven to come live with him.
“Standoffish and distant” was Carson’s initial impression of John, a physician and researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine. Alice, on the other hand, was engaging and personable, “the kind of person you like going to lunch with.”
First impressions can be deceiving.
When Carson interviewed Steven in her office, Alice—who was supposed to be sitting in the waiting room—crouched down outside Carson’s window to eavesdrop. When the boy’s paternal grandfather dropped Steven off in Florida after a cross-country visit with John, Alice stood on the front porch and screamed profanities.
Carson confronted Alice, who admitted cursing at Steven’s grandfather but said that her hands had been covering her son’s ears, so he couldn’t have heard anything. She’d been “squeezing his head so hard,” she said, that she was afraid “it would injure him.”
Soon it was time for Carson to meet with John and Steven together. At this point, she wasn’t sure what to expect. Early in the meeting, Steven started to squirm. John asked for a piece of paper. He and his son began constructing a paper airplane.
“It was clear that they had done it before,” Carson says. Steven “just delighted in giving his dad directions, saying things like, ‘Oh no, Dad. I think we need to put a paper clip here.’ It was just heartwarming to see this guy who seemed very uptight be so completely, completely in tune with his kid. I didn’t expect it.”
John’s department head testified that the father was highly respected in his field and could name his hours. As her experience with the family deepened, Carson came to the conclusion that it was in Steven’s best interest for the little boy to be with his father.
In her closing remarks at the trial, she remembers telling the judge: “When you appointed me to be Steven’s guardian, I took him by the hand and I took him in my heart, and my heart tells me he needs to live with his dad in St. Louis.”
The judge didn’t see it the same way. Primary custody went to Alice.
John gave up his career in St. Louis and took a job as a doctor in a Florida emergency department to be with his son.
Carson still can’t shake the feeling that she let Steven down. “Every once in a while, when I go home, I cut through Shaw Park and see 7-year-old boys playing baseball,” she says. “They’re so full of hope and promise at that age. Whoever shows up to play catch with you before the game is your friend.”
She watches, and she thinks of Steven, wondering how his life turned out: “Sometimes you just want a sign that they’re OK.”
In Cold Blood
Dee Joyce-Hayes
Of Counsel, Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, LLP
By 1991, then-assistant circuit attorney Dee Joyce-Hayes had already handled several cases involving rape, murder and child abuse—but nothing had prepared her for the case of 16-year-old Palestina “Tina” Isa.
“This is the only time in my life where the murder is actually caught on tape,” says Joyce-Hayes, who later served eight years as St. Louis circuit attorney.
Tina, multilingual and bright, was a popular student at Roosevelt High School and had already been awarded a college scholarship. In 1989, the FBI began to suspect that Tina’s father, Zein, was a member of an Abu Nidal terror cell. He was placed under surveillance, and the family’s apartment was bugged. What the FBI caught on tape was chilling.
Upset that their daughter was dating an African-American boy, Zein and his wife, Maria, hatched a plan to murder their daughter. When Tina arrived home one night in 1989, Maria—a big, strong woman—held her daughter down while Zein stabbed her almost 20 times with a butcher knife.
“Mother, please help me,” Tina pleaded on the tape.
Joyce-Hayes says, “There was a point where he was pricking around her left breast,” and even though Zein was speaking in Arabic, there was “a cadence to his speech.” When the tape, the translations and the photos were matched, Joyce-Hayes says, it became clear that Isa was taunting his daughter. “Are you going to be a good girl now?” he asked as he stabbed her.
High-pitched screams rushed from Tina’s mouth, replaced by moans and, finally, silence.
Both parents were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die. Zein became ill and died on death row. Maria’s conviction was overturned, and she was sentenced to life in prison without parole at her second trial.
No other case has ever chilled Joyce-Hayes more.
Prison's Toll
Maurice "Marcy" Graham
Partner, Gray, Ritter & Graham
Almost four decades ago, a bank robbery and shooting rocked a small Missouri town. It was up to Marcy Graham to pursue criminal charges. Though he is now a partner in the plaintiffs’ law firm of Gray, Ritter & Graham, the former Missouri Bar president was then a relatively new lawyer, in his first five years of practice and serving as a prosecutor in southern Missouri.
Tim Johnson*, the man charged in the shooting, was in his middle 20s. He “came from a good family,” Graham recalls, describing the young man as “all-American, handsome and athletic.” Johnson had never been in trouble before.
“Something went wrong in his life,” says Graham. Whatever it was, it led him to crime—and the court case led him to prison.
Four years passed before Graham saw Johnson again. He had filed a court motion arguing that his lawyer had been ineffective in defending him during the criminal case.
When Johnson entered the courtroom, Graham was shocked by what he saw.
“His hair had turned white. His skin was pasty, and he had sunken eyes. He didn’t even begin to resemble that handsome young man,” Graham says. “Prison changed him. It was really a painful reminder to me of what happens there.”
What DNA Won't Say
Doug Levine
Chief deputy public administrator
St. Louis County
More than two decades have elapsed since Doug Levine was appointed to defend George Allen Jr. He’d been charged with murdering Mary Bell, a pretty 31-year-old who had been stabbed in the back 14 times. Her throat had been cut five times from ear to ear. She’d been raped and sodomized. Prosecutors wanted the death penalty.
The case was far from clear-cut. At the time of her death, Bell was separated from her lawyer husband and living with her boyfriend, also a lawyer. On the night of her murder, 20 inches of snow had fallen in the area, which would have made it difficult for Allen, who didn’t have a car and didn’t know Bell, to get to her apartment.
The only fingerprints found at the scene belonged to Bell’s boyfriend. No physical evidence linked Allen to the crime scene. The only reason he became a suspect was that he was walking down the street, seven blocks from Bell’s apartment, six weeks after the murder.
Allen was taken in for questioning and shown pictures of the crime scene. He then gave an inconsistent confession, getting facts wrong before he was corrected and at one point saying: “I’m rememberin’ it ’cause you got the evidence. I don’t remember nothin’. You got the evidence and the fingerprints, you know. Before we started talkin’ I said, ‘No, I don’t remember.’”
For prosecutors, that was enough. But Levine had graduated from law school only four years earlier, and this case would not let him rest.
He set aside a corner in his basement for the stacks and stacks of documents related to Allen’s case. “I turned an old door upside down across a filing cabinet,” he recalls, describing the makeshift table in “George’s corner.”
At the first trial, relying on physical evidence and witness testimony, Levine argued that the boyfriend, not Allen, had murdered Bell. The jury deadlocked, with 10 of 11 jurors voting not guilty. A mistrial was declared.
At the second trial, prosecutors brought in alibi witnesses to testify about the boyfriend’s whereabouts on the day of the murder. Semen was found on a robe and a pair of Bell’s pants, and prosecutors argued that it had been left by Allen when he raped her. DNA testing didn’t exist at the time, but the crime-lab technicians said that the semen had been left by a person who didn’t secrete antigens into his blood. Allen was a nonsecretor.
This time, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Allen probably would have been sentenced to death if a juror’s mother hadn’t died during the penalty phase. Instead, he was sentenced to life without parole.
Levine continued to believe that an innocent man had been wrongly convicted. A few years ago, the Innocence Project got involved in Allen’s case, and Levine hoped that his client would finally be exonerated.
Sure enough, the DNA found on the robe and jeans did not belong to George—but was consistent with the boyfriend’s DNA.
Now St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce says that the DNA tests don’t have any impact on George’s case because they simply indicate that a boyfriend and girlfriend had consensual sex.
“Just wrong” is Levine’s reaction to that argument. He collaborated with the Innocence Project in applying for clemency for Allen, but it has not yet been granted. “This is a human life, not a parlor game where you can just change your strategy merely to win the game,” he snaps. “As the evidence changes, so does their theory of the case.”
Gambling for Life
Eric Selig
Associate, Evans & Dixon
Seventeen-year-old Carlos Saddler was facing charges for first-degree murder, and he had a big decision to make. He’d been locked up ever since he was arrested, awaiting trial. If he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, he would serve about another 17 years in prison. If he refused to plead guilty, he would go to trial the next day and, if found guilty, spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole.
That was about six years ago, and Eric Selig, Saddler’s public defender, was 32 at the time. “Sweet and soft-spoken” is how he remembers his client.
But the charges that Saddler faced were disturbing.
At 16, Saddler had been involved in a gang-related shooting. The victim was also 16. An argument had broken out among several young men. Saddler was carrying a sawed-off shotgun that he said was for his cousin. He claimed that when he walked away from the argument, the other 16-year-old walked after him. Saddler pulled out the shotgun and pulled the trigger. His victim was only a few feet away.
Selig told Saddler about the plea bargain and urged him to take the deal. Saddler’s aunt, “a really solid person and a big part of his life,” was in on the discussion. At the time, she was 33. Saddler did the math and realized that if he took the deal, he’d be her age when he got out of prison. “She’s old,” Selig remembers his client saying. “No way. My life will be over.”
Selig, a year younger than the aunt, pointed out that if Saddler took the deal, he’d “have a life.” But Saddler chose to go to trial and claim self-defense.
The judge refused to give the instruction about self-defense to the jury.
It took the jury about two hours to find Saddler guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to a lifetime behind bars. When the verdict was read in court, he sobbed.
And when Selig’s 33rd birthday arrived, all he could think about was Carlos Saddler.
“My daughter was 3 years old at the time, and my life was far from over,” he says. “Should I have put more pressure on him to take the deal?”
*pseudonym
