Instead of going to Huntington Park and areas and what happened there, and the future DA stuff, I want to share my knowledge of what I believe are the best hiring policies and the plusses and minuses of my experiences with you and come back to the DA’s Office and some great stories of my prosecution cases later.
So, here is a story of one of my hires. My secretary said “Mr Schulman, there is a gentleman without an appointment that wishes to see you.” Slow day, reading reports and research, so why not take a little rest and see what he wants. Send him in I said, and in comes this fellow about six-two, sandy straight hair combed straight back, rather thinly, but well-built, not handsome, but not ugly either, “Hello, I am Marshall, what can I do for you?” He replies, after being seated, that he is presently employed as a prosecutor in the Orange County DA’s Office assigned to the juvenile branch. He is having a hard time getting along with his boss, John Cronnin. (I should have mentioned he introduced himself as Paul Herbert.) So I tell him. “No one gets along with John, but that is his style, but once you get to know him, he is a pretty nice guy. I wasn’t looking for more staff at the time. I believe I had two darn good lawyers employed; one was a former presiding Judge of the criminal department of the Orange County Superior Court, Byron McMillan, who was in effect at the time a full partner regarding division of the profits from the law practice, but I was intrigued. So tell me about yourself, Paul, and he did. His resume consisted of the fact that he was a graduate of Boalt Hall now known as University of California Berkeley Law School and was number 2 in his class and also on the Cal tennis team as an undergraduate. ( I favor former athletes because they have the competitive spirit necessary for the contests of the courtroom.) After he graduated, he was offered a position in one of the largest and most prominent law firms in America; in my memory it was Skadden Arps in New York. Prior to that employment and while in Law school, he worked as an extern for one of the justices of the California Supreme Court and one of the cases he wrote for the justices was actually published adopting his tentative brief. From there to the New York Firm for three years, and then he left to teach law at a Southern Law School (I can’t remember the name. After three years in the South, he then taught at a Law School in the Midwest and after three years, wanted trial experience so that was how he ended up in the Orange County DA’s Office. By then, he had obtained the title of associate professor of Law. Well, he sounded interesting, and though I was not looking for a new hire at the time, I could get this fellow at a very reasonable salary by matching his income that he was receiving from the DA’s Office. So I brought him aboard It turned out it was worth it for the effort he put in, his willingness to learn and, if you will, my fortune in learning from him. If you are any good in the criminal field, then you continue to learn and keep up with all the changes in the law, and also for trial work I have long advocated “You learn from your losses not victories.)
My point is, I only wanted as associates lawyers, male and female, who I believed were as smart or smarter than I. Lots of big-time lawyers like to surround themselves with inferior toadies to bolster their ego. I do not need bolstering or any other self-aggrandizement. Whenever I was working a case that had press coverage, I would not, if I could avoid it, pander to the press or media. That’s me. Almost all of my hires, if not a partnership, ended up as judges or developed their own practice (which will be discussed in further blogs,) and we all remained good friends as each went out to make their mark.
Well Paul, obviously. was a three year-and-out type of guy, gaining experience at each stop. However, in my case, he remained a lot longer, enjoying working with me and the other lawyers in my firm The following is his travels with Marshall.
In the beginning, Paul would write briefs, attend court and observe. I eventually assigned him some trials and I will be darned if he was getting not guilty verdicts on his own cases. I remember one case which was a sure loser at the time: driving under the influence of a drug- to wit- marijuana, where the client was all over the road and had that green leafy stuff caked in his mouth and teeth. Don’t know how he did it, but the jury found the client not guilty.
During the course of employment, he asked for permission to teach at my alma mater, Loyola Law School, a course in something I knew very little about, The Uniform Commercial Code, known as Bills and Notes in my day. Of course he had my permission. While at Loyola, Paul earned a full professorship in Law, which is no mean feat. He also represented a rock group that hired my office and together with an attorney from Northern California, mostly in the East Bay area, Phil Schnayerson, managed to take the charges, which consisted of what was claimed to be pornography on their record label and managed to make the case go away (today there would be no charge as contemporary community standards are quite different.)
I represented a man who was charged with possession of illegal firearms and an ounce of cocaine based on an arrest in Santa Ana, California in LA Federal Court before the Honorable Spencer Letts (The judge was also a Boalt Hall Graduate and also very high in his class standing.) The facts are:
One sunny day, the client may or may not have been observed casing a bank in Santa Ana. The cops supposedly received an anonymous call about a suspicious man oddly observing the bank and the subject’s car and license plate was relayed to the Santa Ana Police Department and then relayed to the police patrol cars. The police followed the car on main street in Santa Ana traveling northbound on Main Street. Observing no traffic violations the Police stopped the car anyway. They had the driver step out, patted him down and recovered a fully loaded 40 Caliber revolver holstered on his right hip. Guess what? They also recovered another forty-caliber revolver attached to his other hip. Client was placed under arrest and a subsequent car search revealed in the car’s trunk a loaded 40 caliber 4M-40, commonly known as a “Rambo” machine gun, and an ounce of cocaine. Those are the facts.
What kind of a defense can you put up, you ask? Why, illegal search and seizure, I say, as the cops had no basis from what they knew to believe a crime was committed. or was about to be committed or was going to be committed, a violation of the subject’s 4th amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
I am a darn good writer when it comes to motions and many of my pleadings have been coined by other lawyers, but in this case I had Paul draft the motion to exclude the evidence, and I have to admit his pleading was superior to ones I had drafted.
So, w were off to Court before Judge Letts. My opponent was Assistant US Attorney Tom Umberg, a really darn good lawyer and this is the way it went:
I argue, Tom argues and the judge denigrate my motion and it looks like we are going to lose, so I start doing a little dancing and ask the court for more time to respond to the court’s concern and I get the time, do a little cosmetic redrafting and the next thing you know the Judge is going along with the defense, so Tom does what I did, asked or more time to respond and he gets what he asked for. More fiddling with the motions by both sides, and when we return, the Judge now thinks our motion is solid and grants the motion to exclude the guns and dope, end of case. Now, Tom takes what is known as an interim appeal before the 9th Circuit. Briefs are submitted and before the appellate Court we go. Argument is presented to the three judge panel. We lose 2 to 1. I prepare a writ to go before the US Supreme Court. That Court generally dismisses 80% of the applications and on the remaining 20%, the solicitor General has to file a response. We made the 80% rule but the court would not hear it and remanded the case to the trial Court. We plead guilty to the cocaine charge, the client got out in 6 months so a win for both sides.
Paul was very helpful on the case and when he addressed the Court neither I nor Tom Umberg could figure out what the two Boalt Hall graduates were talking about.
Well. finally Paul decided to return full-time to academics and got a position at a small Law School in Stockton known as San Joaquin School of Law, not well-known, but had a great pass rate on the Bar Exam.
I lost contact for several years when he showed up to say hello and let me know what he was presently doing.You’re going to have trouble absorbing this:
Paul eventually moved to the Caribbean, attended a Medical School, moved to Miami, became a licensed MD, took a residency in psychiatry, taught at Harvard and then Yale and eventually Vanderbilt and wrote as well as taught psychiatry and the law with many published peer review articles, some on a psychiatrist’s duty to reveal potential patient harm. You can google Paul B.Herbert JD MD for a list of his works. Sadly as I learned, Paul passed away, a very young and brilliant man,
I wrote the above to illustrate part of Marshall’s knowledge is based on being fortunate and wise enough to surround myself with top-level people and pass that on as a thought for anyone about to hire someone as a yardstick for employment.
More to come
Marshall
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