THE ARTISTRY OF ADVOCACY

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31576, 13 January 1968, Page 4

THE ARTISTRY OF ADVOCACY

The Jury Return*. By Louis Nizer. Gotland. 438 pp.

Mr Louis Nizer, one of America’s most famous advocates, here tells of four of his recent cases with compelling power of description, with atmosphere of suspense, and with expert selection of material.

Mr Nizer shows through his fastidious choice of words and his immaculate sense of form how a great advocate must be a great artist. The sales of this book may excel those of his previous one, “My Life In Court,” which already are over 300,000. The author’s burning zeal for justice for the unfortunate and for those cruelly wronged shines throughout the book and through the fierce strategies he employs to overcome the formidable difficulties facing him in each of these cases described. There is little verbatim reporting of each trial’s procedure, but there is enough to illuminate the finest points of cross-examination. How Mr Nizer frequently turns an opposing witness so that the course of testimony soon turns to his client’s favour reminds one of an expert sheepdog compelling reluctant sheep to enter the proper pen as if through hypnosis. The first case is the attempt to have the death sentence on Paul Crump commuted to life imprisonment. Crump, a young Negro hoodlum, had murdered a security guard and severely injured several other people while he and others were trying to steal the pay-roll of Libby’s

factory. Various appeals were made, as i* customary in capital charges, and an appellate court reversed the original verdict A new trial resulted in a conviction and in the death sentence once more. Further appeals, unsuccessful always but bringing about stays of execution, caused the years to pass until all was lost save for an appeal for clemency to the governor of the State of Illinois.

To aid the governor there is an advisory council, and it was to plead before that council that Mr Nizer entered the case. During the years since his first conviction there had occurred a seemingly miraculous rehabilitation of character in Paul Crump. The man about to be electrocuted was a totally different man from the one originally sentenced. Mr Nizer’s great difficulty was that the law did not recognise rehabilitation as grounds for commutation of the death sentence. Although it is obvious why it should be the best reason of all, it is easy to see legal reasons why it would have to be rejected. Any suggestion of opposition to capital punishment itself would have been disastrous. How Mr Nizer unlocked these formidable gates is as fascinating as is the change in Paul Crump himself and both are told in the spirit of high human endeavour and adventure.

The second case concerned a divorce where a wretch of a man by putting all his assets into his mother’s estate had legally made it impossible for hi* wife to recover any alt-

mony. Mr Nizer’s turning of the tables showed the fascinating ingenuity of Portia. The defence of Roy Fruehauf, a wealthy and deeply respected industrialist, from the charge of making a loan to Dave Beck, the president of the teamsters’ union, is a remarkable story of legal argument at the highest levels of Senate and of the Supreme

Court of the United States. In it the crushing blow of rejection of what seemed to be a water-tight appeal to the Supreme Court was a test of Fruehauf’s courage and of Mr Nizer’s terrific ingenuity and fighting spirit in overcoming it. The last case is the most complicated, adventurous, and far-reaching in effect, of the four: and is concerned with libel and gross intimidation. John Henry Faulk, a swiftlyrising television star in the C.B.S. constellation, ran foul of Laurence Johnson and William Hartnett, two men who debased the idea of patriotism into persecution, extortion, and callous wrecking of reputations and even of lives—for several film and television stars committed suicide when unable to obtain further employment because they were smeared by Hartnett and Johnson with suspicion of Communist affiliations.

This terrific story of the unmasking of despicable conduct and of dealing out a resounding legal thrashing holds its readers in complete thrill. Watching a performance on a loose wire above Niagara Falls would be staid in comparison. .