The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed
288
The Moral Compass of the American Lawyer: Truth, Justice, Power, and Greed
288Paperback
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Overview
Is the public right? In this eye-opening, incisive book, Richard Zitrin and Carol Langford, two practicing lawyers and distinguished law professors, shine a penetrating light on the question everyone is asking: Why do lawyers behave the way they do? All across the country, lawyers view certain behavior as "ethical" while average citizens judge that same conduct "immoral." Now, with expert analysis of actual cases ranging from murder to class action suits, Zitrin and Langford investigate lawyers' behavior and its impact on our legal system. The result is a stunningly clear-eyed exploration of law as it is practiced in America today—and a cogent, groundbreaking program for legal reform.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780449006719 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2000 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 702,311 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Carol Langford is principal of the law office of Carol M. Langford in Walnut Creek, California, and a teacher of legal ethics at the University of San Francisco School of Law and at UC Hastings. She has also taught at UC Berkeley. She was a member of the State Bar of California's Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct from 1991 to 1997 and served as its chair in 1995-96.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Buried Bodies:
Robert Garrow and His Lawyers
The most difficult ethical dilemmas result from the frequent conflicts between the obligation to one’s client and those to the legal system and to society.
—Professor (later U.S. District Court judge)
Jack B. Weinstein
On the evening of August 9, 1973, just as Frank Armani was sitting down to dinner with his family, he received a phone call that not only would change his life, but would set him on a course of conduct that years later he couldn’t fully justify, even to himself. The caller was the wife of Robert Garrow, convicted rapist, accused child molester, and suspected serial killer. Police had captured Garrow that morning after the largest manhunt in New York State history, wounding him seriously in the process. Now Garrow lay in his hospital bed in critical condition, refusing to talk to anyone except his wife and his lawyer, Frank Armani.
Armani lived and worked in Syracuse, New York. Due north of Syracuse are the Adirondacks, one of our nation’s most beautiful natural treasures. These five million acres of protected parkland, tree-covered mountains, and idyllic lakes are where people go to escape the heat, crowds, and violence of the Northeast’s urban sprawl—where they go to get away from it all.
That’s just what eighteen-year-old Philip Domblewski and his three friends, Nick Fiorello, David Freeman, and Carol Ann Malinowski, had in mind in late July 1973. They had pitched their tents for the night in a clearing on the edge of the woods just off State Route 8. They woke up to see Robert Garrow, a rifle at his side.
Grabbing a coil of rope, Garrow herded the four friends into the thick woods. He forced Nick to tie David to a tree trunk, then moved deeper into the forest, where Phil was forced to tie up Nick. Finally, after Carol Ann had tied up Phil Domblewski, Garrow took her to another tree and tied her up as well. Garrow then returned to Phil. Carol Ann couldn’t be sure what was happening, but she could hear Phil’s screams. Desperately she managed to work her way out of her bonds and ran off to hide in the woods.
Nick too had broken free. He made it back to the campsite and drove off in search of help. He returned a short time later with a small posse of armed men. They searched until they found David running in the forest in fear of his life and Carol Ann sitting by the body of Phil Domblewski. Phil had been slashed and stabbed repeatedly in the chest and finally killed with a knife wound through the heart. Garrow was nowhere to be found.
Phil Domblewski’s friends soon gave police a positive identification of Robert Garrow. Garrow was a man whose mug shot was well known to the cops. The New York Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the state police quickly organized a massive manhunt. There were good reasons for their urgency. The police knew that Garrow, an experienced backwoodsman who grew up in the area and could live off the land, needed only to cross one state highway to escape into the vast expanse of the Adirondack wilderness. But most important, they feared for the safety of Susan Petz.
Nine days before the Domblewski killing and just fifty miles up the road, police had found the body of Daniel Porter, a twenty-one-year-old Boston College student, tied up and stabbed to death. The pattern of the stab wounds was similar to the stabbing torture inflicted on Domblewski. Porter’s companion, Susan Petz, a Boston College student from Skokie, Illinois, had disappeared. Robert Garrow now became the police’s star suspect in the Porter/Petz case. If Garrow had abducted Susan Petz, she might still be alive—if they could find her in time.
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Hoping that he would be willing to help in their search, the police called Frank Armani, a former deputy DA who now ran his own small law firm. He handled some criminal law work, but concentrated mostly on personal injury cases. He had met Robert Garrow a year earlier, when Garrow asked for advice about a minor automobile injury case. Nothing had ever come of the case, but a few months later, in November 1972, Garrow called Armani from the local jail. Garrow was accused of the false imprisonment of a young Syracuse University couple and possession of marijuana found in his car.
Armani knew that Garrow was on parole for rape, but he also knew that officials considered Garrow an exemplary parolee. He had found good work as a master mechanic at a Syracuse bakery and had worked hard to put his family back together. The New York State Crime Commission had even used Garrow as one of their “poster boys,” an example of the parole system at its best. Garrow swore to Armani that he had done nothing wrong, and when the college couple admitted that the marijuana belonged to them, the case against Garrow was dismissed.
Six months later, though, Robert Garrow was back in trouble. Police claimed that Garrow had driven two young girls, ages ten and eleven, to a secluded area outside Syracuse, where he forced them to masturbate him and perform oral sex. Garrow called Frank Armani. When Armani read the girls’ statements, he was struck by how well organized, detailed, and precise they were. He was convinced that no eleven-year-old could remember so much so precisely, and that the police had coached the girls. At the least, the police were guilty of overzealousness. At the most, his client might just be telling the truth. Armani agreed to represent Garrow. He had started to doubt his client, but he doubted the police work, too.
Armani succeeded in getting Garrow out on bail, and Garrow returned to his job at the bakery. But when the case was called for trial on July 26, Garrow failed to appear in court and the judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest. Three days later Phil Domblewski was killed.
When the police called Armani about the Domblewski killing, they also told him about their suspicions in the Porter/Petz case. Armani offered to help the police bring Garrow in. He even went on TV. “Running away will do you no good, Robert,” Armani said on the air. “I’m willing to help. Come on in, and you won’t get hurt.”
For the next ten days, despite numerous reported sightings, the police had almost no idea where Robert Garrow was. Hope for finding Susan Petz alive faded with each passing day. Finally, on August 7, Garrow made a mistake. He stole a late-model Pontiac from the parking lot of a resort lodge. He headed north but found his way barred by a police roadblock. Garrow accelerated down the highway’s double yellow line and broke through the barricade. He had gotten away again, but this time police thought they knew his destination.
Two days later, in the northeastern corner of the state, troopers flushed Garrow out of the woods behind his sister’s home. As he dashed for another stand of trees, a sharpshooter with a high-powered rifle dropped him with shots in the leg, back, and arm. Garrow was taken to a Plattsburgh hospital in critical condition. There he instructed his wife to call Frank Armani.
Armani had never before handled a murder defense, but he had already represented Garrow in the molestation case. Garrow, who didn’t have enough money for a lawyer on the murder charge, asked the court to appoint Armani. The local trial judge was ready to oblige. By now Armani had strong and serious reservations about Garrow, but this case, already one of the most notorious in upstate New York history, was headline news, a chance to be in the spotlight. With mixed feelings he accepted the appointment.
By the end of August Armani had been joined on the Garrow defense team by Francis Belge, a criminal defense specialist who had handled some of the region’s most difficult cases. Given the overwhelming evidence and the bizarre history and behavior of their client, both lawyers believed that their only chance to save Garrow was an insanity plea, preferably one that included Garrow’s confession to every crime he had committed, not just the Domblewski case. The lawyers figured that the more aberrant and abhorrent Garrow’s behavior was, the easier it would be to prove his insanity.
But three weeks after his capture, Garrow continued to maintain that he could not recall the specific events of the Domblewski killing or the Porter/Petz case, in which the police strongly suspected his involvement. Years later Frank Armani would describe how he finally used party-trick hypnosis to suggest to Garrow that when Belge visited later that day, Garrow would remember everything. It worked; the floodgates opened. Not only did Garrow remember killing Phil Domblewski, he recalled details of the rape and murder of Alicia Hauck, a sixteen-year-old Syracuse girl who had been missing since late July. The more Belge prodded, the more Garrow revealed, in graphic and gruesome detail.
Garrow told how he picked up Alicia Hauck as she was hitchhiking, drove her to a hill near Syracuse University, and raped her. He forced her to walk with him into a cemetery near the campus, and when she tried to run, he “hit her” with his knife over and over, killing her. Garrow described burying the young girl’s body in thick underbrush near a maintenance shack in the cemetery.
Under Belge’s prodding, Garrow began to recall bits and pieces of the murder of Daniel Porter and the kidnapping of Susan Petz. At first all Garrow could remember was fighting with Porter and having a terrible headache. He didn’t recall tying Porter to a tree, but eventually remembered “hitting him” with his knife again and again. Then he had forced Susan Petz into his car and headed north to his parents’ home, four hours away. There he pitched a tent in the woods, tied up his victim, and periodically raped her. When he went off to see his parents or to spend the night at his aunt’s home, he tied Petz with rope and hose, leaving food and water at her feet. After a few days he took Petz to a swimming hole, where she grabbed for his knife and tried to escape. When he described this to Belge, Garrow seemed genuinely puzzled as to why the young woman tried to escape. “We talked, we had great conversations,” Garrow explained. But when Susan Petz went for his knife, Garrow killed her and shoved her body down the air shaft of an abandoned mine.
What People are Saying About This
A fascinating book for lawyers, law students, and anyone who is or might be a client...Zitrin and Langford use a series of cautionary tales for lawyers to engage the reader in the most important ethical dilemmas that lawyers face.
— (Monroe H. Freedman, Howard Lichtenstein Distinguished Professor of Legal Ethics, Hofstra University Law School, author of Understandiing Lawyers' Ethics)
As engrossing as good fiction....This book is important reading for anyone who cares about the law.