Taking a moment to remember Gerry Spence and point our readership to Bob Barney’s commentary on his life’s work. Click here to read: Gerry Spence, Esq. Could He be the Best American Trial Lawyer That Ever lived? and Why Donald Trump can’t get a top-tier lawyer.
Calling himself America’s best trial lawyer, he won justice for Karen Silkwood and successfully defended Imelda Marcos. He also wrote best sellers.
Gerry Spence, the buckskinned legal maverick who called himself America’s best trial lawyer and dramatized that claim with a white Stetson, a dazzling courtroom record and a score of books that gunned down his opponents all over again, died on Wednesday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 96.
His son Kent Spence confirmed the death.
Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.
He sometimes poked fun at his own cowboy imagery — the snakeskin boots and 10-gallon hat, the long silvery-blond hair and buckskin-fringed jackets that conjured Buffalo Bill Cody.
But he exploited it all, often in seemingly hopeless criminal cases.
A man who shot his former wife in front of eight witnesses: Not guilty. The white supremacist charged with killing a federal agent at Ruby Ridge in Idaho: Not guilty. Imelda Marcos, the widow of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, accused of looting the Philippine treasury of $200 million for a lifestyle that included thousands of pairs of shoes and real estate in Manhattan: Not guilty.
In civil cases, he won huge judgments from corporate Goliaths. Penthouse magazine for libeling Miss Wyoming: $26.5 million. An Oklahoma nuclear-fuel producer for the radioactive contamination of Karen Silkwood: $10.5 million. The steel maker USX for cheating workers of their pension funds: $47 million. McDonald’s for breaching a contract with a tiny ice-cream company: $52 million.
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Some awards were later cut or set aside, but the mystical idea of Spence invincibility lingered.
He was big, loud, swaggering and outrageous in court. He once clapped his hands in the face of a drowsy prosecutor and thundered, “Wake up!” He barked at judges.
In a corn-pone drawl, he once told a jury, “You’ve got to get the hogs out of the spring if you want to get the water cleared up.”
He always put on a good show, with tricks and stunts to go with the fine arts of cross-examination and jury persuasion. But behind the courtroom magic lay extensive investigations and meticulous research, techniques he detailed in books and in five-week seminars that he gave annually at the Trial Lawyers College he founded at his 220-acre ranch near Dubois, Wyo., southeast of Yellowstone National Park.
His literary output was prodigious — at least 20 books between 1982 and 2020. Many analyzed his cases. Others denounced justice in America, the legal establishment and lawyers who worked for wealthy clients. Critics faulted much of his writing, labeling it self-righteous hyperbole that was more like courtroom perorations than reasoned arguments. But others called him a gifted storyteller and praised his passion for defending ordinary people against entrenched powers.