F. Lee Bailey, defense lawyer for the famous and infamous, dies at 87

Source: Washington Post



F. Lee Bailey, one of the nation’s most storied criminal trial lawyers and a tenacious defender of O.J. Simpson, Patty Hearst and a host of other famous and infamous clients in a tumultuous career punctuated by his own collisions with the law and his eventual disbarment, died June 3 at a hospice center in the Atlanta area. He was 87. His son Bendrix Bailey confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.

Mr. Bailey was celebrated in some corners and scorned in others as he represented a broad swath of deeply unpopular suspects ranging from mutilation murderers and international drug lords to get-rich-quick-scheme artists. In the courtroom, he fascinated the public with his cool, pointed oratory and prodigious memory as well as his relentlessness. He avidly sought the limelight — even appearing in a Smirnoff vodka ad — and in his give-no-quarter advocacy for his clients, he rarely acknowledged defeat. Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, once called him “an enduring legal figure in the sense that he’s been willing, and in fact relished, taking on clients that were the demons of society.”

A former private investigator, Mr. Bailey was regarded as a master of pretrial preparation — meeting with key witnesses, collecting pictures and documents and visiting locations relevant to the crime. The purpose, he said, was to “stuff my head with enough facts for when the action starts.” Mr. Bailey could question witnesses for hours without notes and was likened by colleagues to such superstar 20th-century courtroom advocates as Clarence Darrow, Edward Bennett Williams and Percy Foreman, who defended James Earl Ray following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The jury was not the only audience Mr. Bailey played to. He championed his clients in an almost constant barrage of commentary to reporters and appearances on “The Tonight Show,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and other television talk programs.

“Massachusetts just burned another witch,” he growled to reporters after a jury in 1967 rejected an insanity plea on behalf of sexual assault defendant Albert DeSalvo. DeSalvo separately had confessed to Mr. Bailey to being the widely feared “Boston Strangler” sought in the killing of 13 women in the early 1960s. Mr. Bailey adroitly excluded the confession from court, then unsuccessfully challenged what he contended was the state’s antiquated definition of criminal insanity in DeSalvo’s unrelated sexual assault case.

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