I’ve mentioned before about my year at Northwestern University School of Law.  I mentioned that I earned an LL.M. in Criminal Law, but I never mentioned what I had to do to get the degree.  I had to earn 12 hours and write a thesis.  Six of those hours (and 90% of my time) came from carrying a case load down at the Cook County Jail.

There were about nine of us in the graduate program and we were assigned to represent “clients” at the jail.  We were like public defenders, but with a very limited case load.  My observation of the public defenders was that they had so many clients that many of them couldn’t represent any of their clients very well.

Bill Martin was our program leader.  No, he never managed the Yankees.  But, what he did do was prosecute Richard Speck for raping and murdering eight Filipino student nurses in Chicago.  The police found Speck’s finger print on the inside of a closet door from the nurses’ apartment.  Bill introduced the entire door into evidence.  Talk about demonstrative evidence.  It took the jury 49 minutes to find Speck guilty and recommend his execution.  Anyway, by 1969, Bill Martin had left the State’s Attorneys Office and was teaching at Northernwestern Law.  The Ford Foundation was funding the graduate criminal defense program to which I was attached.

Probably the most significant case we defended during the year involved a felony murder charge.  A black man came into a jewelry store and attempted to cash a Park Department pay check.  He ended up robbing the store and killing the owner.  Our client, Eugene Overstreet, worked for the Park Department and his name was on the check (the check was gratuitously left behind at the scene of the crime).  Overstreet insisted he never received the check.  The wife of the dead owner identified Overstreet in a police lineup as the robber/murderer.

Bill Martin actually took the lead in defending Overstreet, but a number of us in the program worked different angles of the case.  One of my tasks was to try to find out what happened to the check.  If the prosecution could put the check in Overstreet’s hands, we could fold our tent and slip silently into the night.

How does one get a city job with the Park Department?  Keep in mind that this is Chicago.  The answer is you go see your Ward Committeeman.  Overstreet knew a committeeman and was able to get the Park Department job.  The problem was that he didn’t live in the committeeman’s ward.  Let’s face it, if the system is going to work, you have to live in the ward where you are being sponsored.  In order to help Overstreet out and stay within the “rules,” the committeeman let Overstreet use his street address on the job application.  Now, Overstreet “lived” in the right ward.

As fate would have it, Overstreet copied the street address incorrectly.  The address he put down was to a vacant lot.  Overstreet didn’t know this, but it was not a problem because, on payday, he would pick up the check at the Park Department Office.

Regarding the check in question, Overstreet was somewhere else on pay day.  When he came in the next day to pick up his check, he was told it already had been mailed.  When he checked with the committeeman, he was advised that he hadn’t received the check.  We could verify all of the above facts.  We also discovered the error in the mailing address.

Bill Martin asked me and Ty Fahner to track the route of the check.  Ty subsequently became the Attorney General for the State of Illinois and is presently a partner with Mayer Brown.  We suspected that if someone at the Post Office knew that the Park Department check was going to a vacant lot, they might just put it in their pocket.  Chicago’s main post office was, at the time, one of the largest post offices in the world.  It was a monster.  With the help of a postal official, we started at the end of the building where the mail came in and followed the route the letter/check would have taken through the building.  I should have worn gym shoes.

Even back in the late sixties, the post office had sophisticated equipment to send letters on their way.  A letter would be picked up by an automated arm and the operator would type in the zip code.  Then the arm would place the letter on a conveyor belt and away it would go.  Somewhere down the line, it would end up in the proper basket.  The final sorting, however, was done just like Ben Franklin did it when he was the Postmaster for Philadelphia in 1763.  Someone stood in front of a bunch of cubby holes and flipped in the mail.  We learned that the individuals assigned to sort mail for a particular area did not live in that area.  Thus, they would not know of a vacant lot.

Of course, the mailman would know.  When we spoke to him, he was convincing that he had received no mail to deliver to the vacant lot.  So we never could prove who took the letter, but with the help of the testimony of two post office officials we were able to satisfy the court that Overstreet never received the check.

Bill Martin convinced Overstreet to be tried by judge alone (no jury).  Since it was the check that put Overstreet at the scene of the crime, the case disassembled.  The eye witness testimony proved not to be a problem.  After the judge acquitted Overstreet, he told Bill that if he ever got in trouble, he hoped he could afford Bill’s representation.  Hey, what about the gang of nine?

What a year for an Army lawyer to attend civilian schooling.  It was June 1969, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and I was delighted with my decision to go to Northwestern to get a masters degree in criminal law.*  It turned out my delight was short lived.

The students, the faculty and probably the janitorial service were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War.  I must say that a small group of faculty and graduate students that I worked with treated me well.  I was the only one on campus with short hair and, ironically, one of the few students who wasn’t wearing an Army fatigue jacket.  There was a Federal law prohibiting the unauthorized wearing of military uniforms or pieces thereof.  I mentioned it to a student one day and a professor overheard me and wanted to know why I had this deep-seated anger.  Wow!  I thought I was on my best behavior.  Ripping the jacket off and throwing the kid out in the snow might constitute deep-seated anger.

Most of the student body was involved in draft avoidance counseling.  I have to admit, it was not a good time to be a 19 or 20 year-old male.  A young female student came up to me bubbling with excitement.  It seems her family had found a doctor who was willing to certify that her brother was medically disqualified to be drafted.  I don’t think she selected me out.  I think she was telling everyone she saw.

This was the era when young women didn’t wear bras.  I’m very observant.  But, dammed if they didn’t walk around with their notebooks or purses pressed to their chests.  Now, what kind of statement does that make?  I don’t think it’s very enlightened.

I was asked during my second semester to participate in a moot court trial.  They needed someone to play the arresting officer in a drug sale trial.  I agreed to do it.  The moot court was held in a class room and when I entered to testify, the students in the back of the room started hissing and booing.  Not very professional.  The professor was playing the judge and he did nothing to stop the nonsense.  The facts were bad for the government and when the “judge” ruled that it was a bad search and the evidence was suppressed, everyone in the classroom cheered.

Northwestern had a world class criminal law department.  As a graduate student in that department, I knew all the criminal law professors.  None was teaching this class.  After I testified and while seated in the back of the room, I asked one of the hecklers what class it was.  He said, “It’s Poverty Law.”  I asked him why they were doing criminal law.  He said, “Hey man, lots of poor people get busted on bogus drug charges.”  So, I had my answer.  They could study whatever they wanted, as long as it happened to poor people.  I guess that ruled out Trusts and Estates.

On April 29, 1970, US Forces entered Cambodia where the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had been stockpiling arsenals for their next offensive.  Northwestern, along with most colleges shut down in protest.  A lot of students were able to avoid final exams while the protests drug on.  I was a direct beneficiary of the Cambodian Campaign because my next assignment was Vietnam and I wasn’t located that far from the border.  Shame on the US for entering a “neutral” country and destroying tons and tons of ammunition which belonged to the peace loving North Vietnamese.  If we hadn’t, I might not be writing this.

While I went to school on the downtown campus, we actually lived in Evanston, just a few blocks from the University.  The street that ran along side the University was Sheridan Road.  During the Cambodian protests, students tore down property and piled it in Sheridan Road blocking traffic.  The police did nothing to remove the blockade.  However, when an irate citizen stopped his car and tried to remove some of the blockade, he was arrested for creating a disturbance!  It was not a good year.

Periodically, I receive a phone call from someone at Northwestern asking for money.  After about 20 minutes of me telling them about my Northwestern experience, they just want to get off the phone.

* See “Long Distance Decision Making Before the Internet.”

I am always amazed when I reflect on the whimsical way that significant decisions have been made in my life.  In late 1968, I was in the last year of a three-year tour in Germany.  I figured I would be sent to the Career Course at the JAG School and then off to Vietnam.  Someone in my office, I think John Naughton, showed me a little squib in a JAG monthly publication which said the JAG Corps intended to send a few officers to universities to obtain a masters degree.  Anyone interested should let them know.  I submitted my name and promptly forgot about it. 

On February 10, 1969, I received a letter from the JAG Career Management Office in the Pentagon telling me I had been selected to go to graduate school to obtain an LL.M. in criminal law.  The kicker was that I had to select the law school and be enrolled within the fiscal year (that meant enrolled before June 30, 1969!).  Remember, this was before emails or fax machines.  First Class postal service (snail mail) was the gold standard.

I sent letters to Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, Stanford and Texas University.  The only things I attached were the letter from Career Management and a copy of my undergraduate and law school transcripts.  Then, I just had to wait.

I just took a look at a copy of the letters I sent out.  They were dated February 10!  It was nice to be married to a legal stenographer.  I wrote out the letters and Carole put them in perfect form that very day (did I mention that in law school, I got an A in the Drafting Legal Instruments course?).

Believe it or not, I received a response back from all five schools within two weeks.  Both Harvard and Michigan sent me back my correspondence advising me that they did not have summer classes for graduate students and consequently, they could not meet my requirement of being enrolled by 30 June 1969.  I always think fondly of those rejections.  They could have rejected me for a hundred reasons, but they were kind enough to say they could not meet my requirements.  If you’ve got to be rejected by Harvard and Michigan, that’s the way to go.

Northwestern University sent me back a two page letter telling me they had a graduate level criminal law program and that I would fit in nicely.  It would include obtaining admission to the Illinois bar and carrying a case load down at the Cook County Jail.  Did I mention that I was born and raised in downstate Illinois and really wanted to be a member of the Illinois bar?  When I graduated from law school, I did not have time to take the Illinois bar, because of my military obligation.

The word from the University of Texas was also good.  The had an experimental project on criminal justice funded by the Ford Foundation.  The professor who wrote me said they envisioned using some graduate students and that they were quite interested in me.  The problem was his title.  He was “Chairman, Special Advisory Committee on Recruiting Law Students From Minority Groups.”  I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it spooked me.  I pictured myself being graded against some group under some experimental project.  In reflecting back, I think I over reacted, but back then, I didn’t have time to check it out.  Texas was out.

The letter from Stanford was the last to be received.  It told me that if I had received a “form graduate letter” to please disregard it.  It then said that because of the particular requirements of my situation, my request was “receiving special attention” and that I should hear something shortly from Dean Robinson.  The letter was definitely positive and I really wanted to go back to California.  While I was a Midwest boy, my tour prior to Germany had been in Monterey, California.  While I only spent six months at the Presidio of Monterey studying German, California was etched in my mind.  It would be easy to get hooked on California.  So, again, I waited.

When this drill began, I had 141 days (Feb 10 to June 30) to select a graduate law school (that would accept me), get approval from the Army and move my family and worldly possessions from Germany back to somewhere in the US and be enrolled in the law school.  Did I mention finding a place to live?  And, I waited to hear from Stanford.  Did I mention that I’m a Type A?

By Friday, March 7, I decided to call Dean Robinson.  I waited till 5:00 PM, which would be 9:00 AM in California.  Dean Robinson’s secretary told me he was on the East Coast and gave me the number.  I ended up talking to Dean Robinson at noontime in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He apologized for not responding and told me I had been approved to come to Stanford.  They didn’t have a graduate criminal law program, but they would set me up with a criminal law professor and we could put a program together.  He assured me he would send a letter to me quickly.  I thanked him and hung up.  I looked at my wife, Carole, and said dejectedly, “Honey, we’re going to Northwestern.”  I really wanted to go to Stanford, but in the area of a graduate level criminal law program, Northwestern won hands down.  I would never become a California golden boy.

After reading through this blog, I realize the only thing whimsical was getting into the graduate program.  My selection of Northwestern was probably the right choice for me and I took the necessary steps to get there.  It gave me a chance to work with Professors Fred Inbau, Bill Martin and Jim Haddad.  Today, with the internet, I could have done all my research on line and made a much more informed decision in one-tenth of the time.  But in 1969, in Goeppingen,  Germany, with the clock running, we did what we had to do.  Auf Wiedersehen.