BY DAVID NOONAN

DAVID NOONAN ts o Writer who lives and works inNew York. He last Reared in these pages witha report on the California marijuana industry.

ESQUIRE/MAY 1981

n the night ofJuly 15,1978, Ed Can-trell, the director of public safety in

Rock Spriiigs, Wyoming, shot an undercover narcotics agent named Michael Rosabetween the eyes at point-blank range,killing him instantly. Cantrell said it wasself-defense, but nobody believed him—not even the other two cops who were inthe car with him and Rosa when the shooting occurred. Cantrell was charged withfirst-degree murder, and on the streetsand in the bars and newspapers of Wyoming he was branded a cold-bloodedexecutioner.

Nobody believed Ed Cantrell when hesaid it was a case of kill or be killed, because MichaelRosa's gun had never left itsholster. And nobody believed him becauseRosa died just two days before he wasscheduled to testify to a grand jury investigatingviceandofficial corruptioninRockSprings. WhatEd Cantrellhaddone, most

people figured, was Issue the ultimate in- \junction.

Although the state was not seeking the ^death penalty, Cantrell wasn't optimistic,after twenty-eight years as a Wyominglawman, about his life expectancy inside aprison. Whathe needed was the best lawyer he couldfind; and when you need the :best lawyer you can findin Wyoming, you ,call up Gerry Spence, the man who doesnot lose. So Cantrell's lawyer phonedSpence and asked if he mi^t be inter- jested in handling the case. Spence said ino, he wasn't inclined to get involvedwith any "goddamn assassin." Then hethought about it awhile and finally a^eedto meet with Cantrell and hear his side ofthe story.

"Ten minutes after I met Ed Cantrell, I.knew he was telling the truth," Spencesays now. "And I knew I had to try to savehis life."

HOME ON THE RANGEGERRY SPENCE LIVES

WITHIN HEART-STOPPINGVIEWOFTHETETON

MOUNTAINS. AMID THEGREAT HOLY EMPTINESS OF

WYOMLNG. THE NULLIONAIRELAWYER ALSO

OWNS A35,000-ACRE WORKINGCATTLE RANCH NEARBY.

fter practicinglawfor twenty-seven> / a ypars in the relative obscurity ofthe Mountain West, Gerry Spence gainednational recognition in 1979 when he wona $10.5-million settlement against theKerr-McGee Corporation in the heavilypublicized Karen Silkwood plutonium-contamination suit, which is generally considered the most important nuclear energy-related court case to date. Thatrecognition was reinforced this wnterwhen Spence won a libel judgment againstPenthouse magazine wordi S26.5 million—the largest standing libel award in history.These victories were certainly no surpriseto Spence, whose enormous self-confidence borders on egomania. Nor werethey a surprise to those familiar vAth hisrecord: Spence handles only criminalcases and big-money civil suits, and hehasn't lost one in ten years.

Outside the West, though, Spence wassomething brand-new, and when he wonthe Silkwood case the media ate it forbreakfast. Spence was the cowboy whobeat the corporation, the Lone Rangerlawyer who rode mto Oklahoma, doffedhis six-hundred-gallon cowboy hat, andwhomped "the men ingray," as he dubbedthe panel of lawyers representing Kerr-McGee. Gerry Spence was great copy—amillionaire, a cattle rancher, a poet, apainter, a g^uine western Renaissanceman. But above all he was a master attorney, and when the Silkwood verdictcame in he found himself elevated to membership in the exclusive club that includesE Lee Bailey, Melvin Belli, RacehorseHaynes, and fewer than a handful of otherswho are touted as the best trial lawyers inthe country.

"I really don't know what that means,"Spence says of his sudden emergence asone of the nation's legal elite. "I only knowI have to ^vin because I can't stand the painof losing."

3 hetrialofEdCantrellbeganinmid-f3 November 1979, sixteen months

after the shooting and six months afterSpence's Wctory in the Silkwood case. Soconscious of his reputation had Spence become that during the jury-selection process he asked potential jurors whetherany of them "would hold it against Ed Can-trell because he hired this flamboyant hotshot that gets people off."

A change of venue had moved the trialfrom Sweetwater County, where the townof Rock Springs is located, north to Sub-lette County. One of the things workingagainst Cantrell was the fact that the people of Sublette County had watched successive murder trials in their courthouseend in acquittal. There was talk of how thecounty was developing a reputation as aplace killers could walkaway from. It wasin the air; there was no way that Ed Can-

ESQUIRE.'.MAY1931

"The courtroom isa place of blood anddeath," says Gerry

and real death."

That's the big anglefor him—the onefact he falls backon when all elsesinks from sight.

trail was going to be the next one to walk.That was among the problems facing

Gerry Spence as he delivered his openingstatement to the twelve people who woulddecide whether or not Ed Cantrell wasguilty of first-degree murder. Those whohave seen Spence in court—whetherthey've seen him once or seen him manytimes—all remark on the near-mysteriouscontact he makes with members of thejury. At times, it seems as though he iscasting a spell; in fact, an opposing attorney once told a judge that he was con-\inced Spence ^as literally hypnotizingthe jury. That is not the case, Spencesays; "1just talk western."

Of course, he does do a bit more thanjust talk western to the folks on a jury. Hehas grown up with and perfected thedown-home idiom in all its forms, from theeasygoingmanner of the front-porch philosopher to the fevered pitch of the country preacher in the grip of divine inspiration. His simple narrative style relaxesjurors; it relievesthem to hear plain talkina placeas foreign as a courtroom. On topofthat, Spence is in a position to take onlythose cases he believes in, and so he caninvest tus owm passions in each case andcommunicate those passions to the jury.He opens himselfup to the jurors and asksthem to trust him; helets t^em know thathe trusts them, that they are good andhonest people who want to do the rightthing; he lets them know, too, that hewants them to do just that, so they are in ittogether and they must help and love oneanother and get to the bottom of this greathuman problem that has been laid beforethem—this problem of Ed Cantrell, "mygood friend Ed." In time, it becomes akindof group therapy session; it is Spenceandthe jury against the world, as they lookto him for clarity. And he gives them clarity the way a good teacher does—with ablackboard (a trademark of Spence'scourtroom style), a blackboard with anoutlineof everything he wants to tell themwritten out clearly in black and white.

And, of course, there is the voice—the

rich, musical voice Spence has been honing since he first discovered its power,back when he was a boy singing in churchchoirs. With that voice, deep and clear andfull of western soul, Spence can blow theroof offor put the baby to sleep. He can cutthrough the heightened nervous buzz thatenvelops men when they find themselveson ajury, charged \vith the impossible taskof seeing the truth in strangers; he can cutthrough it and convince them that thetruth reposes there, right there, in theeyes of his client.

As well known as he is for his way withjuries, Spence is equally renowned for thephenomenal amount of work he and hisstaff put in before a trial begins. In theCantrell case, Spence's obsessive pretrialpreparation eliminated two major stumbling blocks—the general perception ofMichael Rosa as an innocent victim andthe credibility of the grand jury Rosawas scheduled to testify before.

Spence took care of the grand jury duringthe unusually longpreliminaryhearing,held nearly a year before the trial itself.Originally impaneled to investigate allegations of statewide political corruption, thejury, Spencesaid, had come up with "justpiddly little things that made them looksillyto the press." By the time the grandjury got to Rock Springs, he argued, it wasdesperate for a fall ^y. In the course ofthe three-week hearing, Spence exposeda pattern of deception, intimidation, andcover-up (complete \vith shreddedfiles) inthe grand jury's handling of its RockSpringsinvestigation andinits subsequenthandling of the CantreO case. That behavior was orchestrated by the specialprosecutors in charge of the grand jury,Spence later told the Cantrell jury, and itwas motivated by their need for a BigCase.

Spence's pretrial investigation of Michael Rosa enabled him to portray thetwenty-nine-yeai'-old New York-raisedPuerto Rican as a failed policeman, a druguser and dealer, and an unstable, paranoidpersonality. It also enabled him to showthe jury that Rosa had no evidence to present to a grand jury that could have beendamaging to Ed Cantrell.

After Spence had laid all that out, supported it with eridence, and defended itwith cross-examination, it finally all camedown to the actual shooting—to that essentially western blinkofan eye when EdCanirell drew his gun and shot MichaelRosa.

Cantrell is a soft-spoken man of fifty-three, with a thin, rugged face set off bycrystal-blue eyes and a white brush moustache. Up until thetime ofthe Rosa shooting his record was, as they say, unblemished. His reputation was that of atough, straight officer, and his skillwithagun was unmatched in the state, possiblyin the entire West. (He is. in fact, partiallydeaf now as a result of the thousands of

practice rounds he has fired over the lastthree decades.) He is stonily reticent, atrue western man whose pleasure is toh^^nd explore the mountains and plainsOi yoming.

After clearing away the complicatedmess of the grand jury and of Rosa's reputation, Spence put Ed Cantrell on thestand and asked him about the shooting.Cantrell simply said what he had been saying all along: that he looked into Rosa'seyes and saw murder there and then sawRosa go for his gun, and so he shot him.The deed took an estimated two fifths of asecond, which is why Rosa's gun nevercleared his holster and why the two othercops who were in the car at the time of theshooting didn't see anything. And thetwelve members of that western jury,each living among the ubiquitous guns ofWyoming, believedCantrell,' they believedthat a man could spot murder in anotherman's eyes, believed that that was reasonenough to draw and fire. The jury pronounced Ed Cantrell not guilty of &st-degree murder, and he got up and walkeddown the stairs and past the display casesin the courthouse lobby that held morethan forty guns and rifles, and he strolledout the door.

ust remember one thing," saysGerry Spence. 'The courtroom is a

e of blood and death. Real blood andreal death." That's the big angle forSpence, thesingle clear fact hefa& backon when everything else sinks from sightor blows up in his face.

Shortly before the Cantrell case began,Spence went huntingand killed a bullelk,just as he has been huntingand killing elkand other noble animals ^ his life. ThewaySpencesees it, hispropensityforbagging big game is an essential element ofhis success in the courtroom. Spence,you see, believes that a man can be suc-(sssfiilcnlyifhe trulyknowshimself. Whichis not exactly a new idea. But to Spence,bom and raised in Wyoming, a state withmore wild animals than people, to knowhimself a man must be blood-dose to nature, to the inherently violent flow of lifeand death as it is found in the wilderness—vdiat slim wilderness remains. To succeedat the practice of law, Spence posits, a manshould first have a personal knowledgeofthelaws ofthejun^e. And he's nottalking about being able to spot a potentialmugger from two blocks away or knowingwhere to stand while youwaitfor a subwaybeneath Times Square at three in themorning. He's talking about jungle.

^4nk/'Your body wasn't built to sit in someice," says Gerry Spence, attomey-at-

law. "Yourgoddamn body was built to walkthrough the woods and gather food. Tochase and kill and survive in nature. Outside. Not in phony, artificialenvironmentslike New Yorkor Chicago."

"There is no bettertrial lawyer in

America today thanGerry Spence,"says one notedpublic-interest

attorney. "That's atruism and a

very important factto keep in mind."

It seems to Spence that just yesterdaywe were mddng it go from caves, slayingthe woollymammothwithrocksandclubs,grunting out our respect for lightningstorms and squatting patiently by newfound fires, waiting for one of our hairybrethren to stumble on the idea of thewheel. Spence insists that those dimdayshave more to do with who we are now thmall the clutter and all the noise that menhave produced since they realized therewas more to life than fresh meat and sex.He sometimes images that he is doingbattle not in a courtroom but "in a clearingat tiie edge of the f^est, five thousandyears ago," and that'he is surviving on"raw anmial instinct" And woe unto theattorney who was raised in the dty amid"false attitudes and pressures that are notreal," says Spence, because the manwhohas been created in such a place "isn't anymore real than the environment fromwhich he came. And as a consequence, hehas no way to really survive against thelikes'ofme."

Yes, Gerry Spence holds that smalltown country lawyers, by virtue of theirrelationship withnature, Imowthemselvesbetter and are therefore better in courtthaidty-bredlawyers. "And,"hesays, "ifany of your New Yofk lawyers want to tryme, teUthem I said so."

Not surprisingly, Spence is fond of thework of Ernest Hemingway—particularlyDeath in theAfternoon, the writer's celebration of bullfighting. When he isn't comparing the courtroom to a dearing in theforest, he's comparing it to the bullring.Spence considers Death the best bookever written about being a lawyer and recommends it to the young lawyers hemeets everywhere he goes.

Spence loves young lawyers. He feelssorry for them because they wage suchgreat andserious battles andbecausetheydon't have any idea what's going on. Hewants to educate them, to give them thebenefit of his years of not having any ideawhat was going on. His dream is his owngraduate school of trial law, the point of

as

which would be to teach direct, honestcommunication. He'd train his students tolove themselves; he'd tell them that loveis a powerful courtroom weapon. .Theywould study dance to develop rhythm,paintingand poetry to get their feelingsout. To leani about the secrets of thevoice, they'd listen to tapes of counti^ministers and opera singers and MartinLuther King Jr. The school would be located in the mountains of Wyoming, andSpence just might pull it off.

Until then, he spends a lot of his timeworking with the National College forCriminal Defense, a postgraduate institution that offers training in trial techniquesto the criminal-defense bar. He attendsseminars regularly and gives demonstrations and lectures on cross-examination,voir dire, and other courtroom skills.Spence is alwaysa big hit witha roomfulofyouig lawyers. He tells them how scaredand intimidated he gets in court, and mostofthem don't understand. He tells them toima^e that the judge is a little boy whojust got caught playing with himself in thebathtub, or to picture the prosecutor'swife "turning her big &t back to him inbed" because he just lost another case. InNashvflle last year, during a masterfuldemonstration of how to disembowel apsychiatrist on the witness stand, heturned to the audience, smiled gleefully,and said, 'They can have all the psychiatrists in the world; just give me the jury.They can even bring in old Papa Freudhknself for aU I care, scratching his ballsand worrying about his libeeedo."

When Spence addressed a meeting ofthe Litigation Groupof the American BarAssociation in Chicago not long ago, hecalled thepeople who run thelaw ^ools"the morticians of the profession" and saidthat all lawprofessors do is instill fear instudents, intimidate them, and primethem for more intimidation when they getinto court. He said that the ABA is "loadedwith elitists and geriatrics." He readAmerican Indian poetry aloud and said,"We need a new lawyer. We need a newapproadi by new people. We need warriors who are also men of great love."

here is no better trial lawyer in thecountry today than Gerry Spence.

That's a truism anda very irhportant facttokeepinmind." SosaysDanny Sheehan,the young attorney who supervised thedevdopment of the Karen Silkwood suitand one of tiiose responsible for Spence^involvement in the biggest case of his career so far. Sheehan speaks from his vantage point as one of the nation's mostsuccessfid public-interest lawyers, whosecelebrated work has included the Wounded Knee tr^s, the Daniel EUsberg defense, and the Panther 21 case.

The Silkwood action was a negligencesuit brought on behalf of the Karen Silk-

ESQUIRE/MAY 1981

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A

i\ SELF-PORTRAIT byspence the painter, poet, rancher. lawiTR—the genulne western renaissance man

i estate against Kerr-McGee, theL A supplier of uranium in the country

. and a pioneer Ln the production of plu-! tonium. Silkwood, a Kerr-McGee em-; ployee, died in a one-car automobile acci-

dent on November 13, 1974, while on herway to meet with one of her union officials

j anda reporterforTheNew York Times. Inthe months prior to her death, she had

j been investigating lax procedures in themanufacture and handling of plutonium atthe Kerr-McGee plant outside OklahomaCity. Many involved in the action believeshe was murdered. The case Spence woncharged Kerr-McGee wth negligencethat resulted in the contamination of Sdk-wood by plutonium that somehow foundits way into her refrigerator—plutoniumthat had come from the Kerr-McGeepl^t.

Sheehan asked Spence to join the Silk-wood team because he knew of Spence'scourtroom skills and of his reputation forgoingafter the bigmoney and getting it.

"It was a crossing of life-styles," Sheehan says ofSpence's involvement. "Therewe were, a bunch of crusading save-the-worlders who live on hope and a prayer,and we knew very well that to m^e thewhole package go we needed a hard-

>iipsed, tough, ali-business law>*er likeerry Spence.*'.

, If hard-nosed toug'nness is what theyneeded, a killer atLomey is what they got.Despite the tendency of the law to reducea given human event to an impenetrabletangle of crippled language and coffee-stained file folders, the courtroom remains one of the few places where thecontroversies of modem life can be definitivelyresolved. In a trial, somebody winsand somebody loses. For attorneys it's aone-on-one proposition, and Spence always goes for Idle throat. The opposingattorney is the enemy. He wants to killSpenceand Spence'sclient, so Spencehasto kill him. That's the word Spence uses.He talks about killing witnesses withcross-examination and about being careftilto kill only the witnesses the jury wants tosee killed. He believes that a man can'treally learn to kill but must be bom withthe ability, and that he, Spence, was. Hehas the genes for it, he says, and thatmakes him a good attomey. After nearlythirty years as a trial lawyer, he is solocked into this notion that he has cometo the conclusion that actual physicalstrength has a lot to do with his success.He doesn't smoke and he doesn't drink

^ (though he once indulged in both), and heis a daily runner. At six feet two and 220pounds, he Is a formidable biped, especiallyatop two inches of bootheel.

There is no doubt that his conditioninghelps him survive the rigors of three-month trials, but for Spence there is moreto it than that.

"If I can physically subdue my opponent, I will probably win in the court-

"Your body wasn'tbuilt to sit in

some office," saysattomey Spence.

"It was built towalk through thewoods and gatherfood, to chase and

kill and survivein nature."

room," Spence says. "There is a subconscious knowledge between animals,including human animals, as to who is superior and who can win." When Spenceandthe opposing attomey are calledto thebench together, Spence will sometimesmake it a point to "stand close—shoulderto shoulder—so he feels my physical presence in the courtroom, feels my wholebeing." And thereafter, Spence says, everything that happens in court is siftedthrough the opposing attorney's "subconscious knowledge" -ihat if it were knivesor knuckles, Spence would leave him in aheap on the floor.

Spence won theSilkwood case bykilli^off the more than twenty "expert witnesses" who testified on behalf of Kerr-McGee. "Cross-examination was the keyto winning that case," says Spence. Oneofthe themes that emerged in his cross-examination of the Kerr-McGee witnesseswas an attack on their experience andqualifications. One of the defense's keytechnical, witnesses was forced to admitthat yes, his degree was in poultry farming. And yes, many of the "experts" whohad helped design and build the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant had never donethat kindof work before. And yes, the manin charge of security had never had anyexperience in that field but was in fact aretired Air Force colonel whose only expertise was inmaintenance. Andyes, oneof the plant administrators had come toKerr-McGee in a merger with anothercompany and had no prior experience indealing withplutonium. The case went onlike that, and Spence made the most of it,drawing for the jury a picture of Kerr-McGee as a slapdash operation and thenlaying out the deadly facts of plutoniumcontamination.

Spence was particularly successful atriding herdonthe manysciences andtechnologies involved inthe case—everythingfrom nuclear physics to mechanical engineering to molecular biology. He kept thejargonat levels the jury could understand,at one pointcomparing citations issued by

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission tospeeding tickets. His abilityto keep thingson a human scale is what really won thesuit. As complicated as the details became, he never let the jury forget that thecase was really all about a twenty-eight-year-old woman with three kids and—thanks to Kerr-McGee and the federalgovernment—one hell of a good chance ofdying of cancer. If, that is, she hadn't already died in a highly suspicious automobile accident.

Spence Is proud of the work he did onthe Silkwood suit He says it may be "themost important case of aU time, because ithas to do vvith the survival of man, andthere can't be anything more importantthan that."

When he thinks about what GerrySpence could accomplish in the field ofpublic-interest law, Danny Sheehan getsseriously excited. Though he knowsSpence is not the kindof man whocan bepushed into things, Sheehan believes thatSpence is instinctively drawn tothe areaofpublic interest. For his part, Spence iscontent to remain the independent operator with a taste for what he calls "double-barreled cases," cases %vith big fees andsocialsignificance. Movements are simplynot his style.

'There could be an extraordinary alliance between the public-interest communityandGerry Spence,"Sheehansays,"ifonlyhe wouldn't dumpallover the people.When theybring him inat the end ofacase, he somehow has to dominate themand make them know they're not usinghim. It's unfortunate, but I view it as atemporary phenomenon."

Finally, though. Sheehan pays Spenceperhapsthe highest compliment a lawyercan pay. "If Gerry Spence were to makethe public interest Ws client, I think hecould be the greatest trial lawyer sinceClarence Darrow."

0 errySpence is sitting inhis state-of-the-art super four-wheel-drive

pickup truck, the one with the .22 Magnum pistol secured beneath the seat andthe cassette stereo system on which heplays only classical music (Brahms is afavorite). He is talking about life in Wyoming during the Depression while he gas-ses uphisvehicle forthehundred-mile tripover the mountains from Jackson to his35,000-acre working cattle ranch in Du-bois (pronounced "Dew-boys" in Wyoming. friend).

For the last two years Spence has beenconducting his practice out of Jackson,Wyoming, in the Teton mountains on thewestern edge of the state. His officeis indowntown Jackson, but he lives with hissecond wife, Lanelle, and her fifteen-year-old son in a house he built a few milesoutside town, deep in a grove of trees andclose by the Snake River, just far enough

ESQUIRE/MAY 1981

! awayfrom Grand Teton mountain to affordI him heart-stopping views ofthat powerful

z^^peak.Spence is profoundly in love with Wy-

I oming, especially with the Tetons, which[ rise violently, suddenly, against thej western sky in a long, jagged line of! raw power; yet there is somethinggrace-j ful about them, something in their scale: that does not ovenvhelm. They keep a man• in his place, but they donot (iminish him.i In certain lights they could even be saidi to look delicate. Spence's enthusiasm for

the Teions is tireless. "I have never seenthem look the same way twice, not inall the years I've known them," he saysas he watches the sun set beliind them.They cut off the day suddenly, and then,in the strange, silent dusk that is reallyjust the shadow of a mountain, Spencepoints across a snowy field to a line oftrees. "There," he says. "Do you see themoose?"

This is the country where Gerry Spencewas bom—inLaramie, Wyoming, on January 8,1929, just in time for the collapse ofeverything. Though his father, a chemistfor the railroad, worked throughout theDepression and his family was better offthan many, there was never much moneyin the house. Spence grew up in the townofSheridan, eating elk, deer, and antelope

^ that his father shot. In the summer theycaught fish a^d kept a vegetable garden inthe back, and there were goats for milk.Gerry didn't taste beef until he was fifteen. Even today, Spence the millionaireremains insecure about money.

It was not for the financial rewards orfor any other reason he can remember,though, that Spence decided to be a lawyer. "I didn't know any law>'ers; I'd neverseen one in court. I read a book about alaw>'er once and I had some ideas aboutClarence Darrow, but that was it," hesays. "I just knew I had some talents that Ineeded to use, and I didn't know how elseto use them excepting to be a la\v7er."

Spence graduated from the Universityof Wj'oming law school in 1952 and ser\'edas the prosecutor of Fremont County, Wyoming, from 1954 to 1962. After a disastrous run for Congress that year, he dedicated himself to representing insurancecompanies in personal-injury cases. Hewas extraordinarily successful at it, beating the best attorneys in Wyoming andtroubleshooting for insurance companies

I outside the state as well. "And nobodyj knew who the hell Iwas. They didn't un-i derstand how the hell somebody from

Riverton, Wyoming, could come into Den-! ver and take on the big lawyers from the

^ 1 city and whip their asses.": But for aU his success, Gerry Spencej was not really milking it.By 1969, when heI turned forty, Spence felt "trapped and lost :1 and full of despair." His marriage wasn't 'j working, and he was sick of the law and i! sick of himself. He lost three cases in a iI

ESQUIRH/.MAV 19SI

Every time he went |out, he ran into !people he'd beatenin insurance

cases—a world full ij

of cripples defeatedby Gerry Spence.He now representsno corporations,only individuals.

row, a first for him, and he missed out on ajudgeship when the community powers inRiverton and the surrounding towns—people he had been beating in court allthose years—protested to the governor."I just felt like I was going no place,"Spence recalls.

So he sold everything he owned—hisranch, his house, his guns, everything—and went off to San Francisco to attend artschool. He had been painting since 1961and had been accepted into a master'sprogram at San Francisco State on thestrength of his pgrtfolio. He was finishedwith the law, but a final gesture he wrotean ad and sent it off to the journal of theAmerican Bar Association, the bestTRIAL L.-\WYER LN AMERICA NEEDS WORK,

the ad read. It was rejected as unprofessional.

"I lasted in art school exactly threedays," Spence says. He settled liis familyin Mill Valley and after just a month returned to Wyoming, to Casper. It was theend of his marriage, after twenty-oneyears and four children.

Spence didn't take long getting backinto the business of representing insurance companies. He remarried, quit drinking, cooled himself out, and took stock.Around 1970he started running into a manwith a back injury, a man he had beaten outof his right to recovery in an insurancecase. Every time Spence went to the supermarket, it seemed, he saw the guy. Astime went by, he started seeing more ofthe people he had beaten; they seemed tobe all over the place, a world of cripplesdefeated by Gerry Spence. Finally it gotto him. That year he cleaned house, cutting loose all his insurance companies.

"It really happened just like that," saysSpence. "Now I represent only people—no corporations—and it's made me feel alot better. And I do a much better job. I'ma much better trial lawyer today than I wasten years ago, when I thought I hadreached my pinnacle. And I knownow thatI will continue to get better until the day Idie."

n a single year that was undoubtedly •-^the biggest of his career, Spence was ithe prosecutor in an extraordinary murder •case that was tried after Silkwood and be- ;fore Cantrell. It was extraordinary for 'Spence because three of the four murder >victims had been personal friends of his, ,andbecause, havingactively opposed cap- !ital punishment during all his years as an iattorney, he made a complete reversal and :asked for the death penalty. •

The man Spence wanted to send to ideath row was twenty-nine-year-old Mark 'Hopkinson. Acting, along withhispartner ;Eddie Moriarty, as special prosecutor, :Spence sought four first-degree murder iconvictions for a killing spree that began ;in the early-morning hours of August 7, j1977, when a Wyoming attorney namedVincent Vehar, hiis wife, and their eigh-teen-year-old son were blown out of their !beds and out of this world by a dynamite ibomb tossed into the basement of their 'home. j

Vehar, whom Spence had known for !more than twenty years, was the attorney ifor the Bridger Valley District SewerBoard, a bodyMark Hopkinsonhad begun ;terrorizing after a disagreement over the ;cost of some sewer hookups for a trailer ,camp he'd built. Twenty-one months after ithe Vehar murders, as Hopkinson's trial ifor arranging those killings was about to 'begin, Spence's key witness in the case, |twenty-four-year-oid Jeff Green, was kid- Inapped, tortured, andmurdered. Hisbody jwas found at a rest stop onInterstate 80. iOne of his eyes had been burned out andhe had been burned over much of his body ;before he was killed by a bullet in the neck •from a .30-caliber rifle. Hopkinson was >charged with first-degree murder in 'Green's grisly death. Like the Vehar mur- ;ders, the killing had been arranged by ;Hopkinson, a former high school football jstar. He had made the arrangements from 'inside a prison. It was for Green's murder ;that Spence sought the death penalty. i

"The death penalty is an evil; it is a 'pernicious, poisonous blight on human- jity," Spence says. "It's monstrous and ;should be eradicated from society." But ;Spence is speaking "abstractly" when he •calls the death penalty "premeditated !murder by society." He is speaking "ab- :stractly" when he says, "There really isn't jany reasonable ground for the mainte- jnance of the death penalty. It just makes •murderers of us all." But with the Hopkin- !son Idllings, Spence says, "we are talk- jing about a specific case and a specific lsituation." I

Spence told the jury in the Hopkinson icase how he had always been opposed to Icapital punishment. But, he said, there \was one reason to decide in favor of the •

death penalty, and it had nothing to do |with punisliment or re\'enge or deterrence, iIt was a matter of self-defense, he

them, the rare instance when societyshould exercise its right to defend itself''^ist a manwho had shown the callous. —and the ability—to killand Idil again,even after he was behind bars.

As he stood in the courtroom andneared the end of his closing statement,Spence asked the jury to consider thebeds where the victims had been sleeping,the beds that were changed to "pallets forthe corpses."

i "Now, it's not my duty to speak to you ofi shock, and the griefand the horror and the

trauma and the destruction of the living,j and the scarring of the survivors and the

sleepless nights and the terror and the: dark and the screams of little children andI the women and their nightmares," he in-I toned. "It's only my function to say we all^ have beds. You have been along time away; from yours. And I expect you are lookingj for\vard toreturning toyour own beds, toj your own security, to your warmth and

love and peace. It's not my function tospeak to you, ladies and gentlemen, ofhate or vengeance or revenge, it's not mycalling to create in you any hate againstthis man. There has been enough hate,enough vengeance, enough games, enou^revenge. My purpose is more removed,and I trust yours \siil be. Our purpose is torespect the law where there has been no

"^^respect. To make the law alive and mean-mgfdl and real, where the law has-beendead and buried in Uinta County. My function and yours, ladies and gentlemen, is toraise the great protective structure of lawand order once more, in Uinta County andeverywhere that men and women and children and families \vant to go safely andpeaceably to their beds and to their homesand to their castles."

When the jury returned with a verdict,they had found Mark Hopkinson guilty offour counts of first-degree murder. Thesentence was death,

j Spence's law firm did not charge thestate for the costs incurred in investigating and prosecuting the Hopkinson case,costs estimated at nearly one million

i dollars. "I did it for Vince," Spence says.He did it for Vince, and though he insiststhat he was seeking justice, not revenge,Spence admits that justice is sweeter insome cases than in others.

O'nesuch case is the multimillion-dollar suit he pressed against Penthouse

magazine on behalf of Kim Pring, MissWyoming of 1978. In its August 1979 issue, Penthouse ran a piece of "humor"about a baton-twirling Miss Wyomingwhose talent for fellatio far outstrippedher talent with a baton. Pring, the onlyMiss America contestant in 1978 whotwirled a baton as part of her act, was notamused. Nor was Spence, who set out toavenge this insult to the cream of Wyoming womanhood.

Responding to the $26.5-million judg- jment against him. Penthouse publisher !Bob Guccione saii "It's not worth the ipaper it's written on."

"Well,"Spence replied, "I've always respected Mr. Guccione as a purveyor ofgirlie magazines, but I don't put muchstock in lois legal opinions."

Another case Spence currently has under way may end up in the same league asSilkwood's, in terms of dollars as well associetal and legal implications. Spence isrepresen.ting one of the widows and thechildren of slain Utah polygamist JohnSinger, who died of a shotgun blast in theback suffered when he was surroundedby police outside his home in January1979. Singer, who was armed at the timeof his death, had been waging a strugglewith state authorities over the educationof his children. An excommunicated Mormon, he had two wives and seven children whom he refused to send to publicschools.

"It's an extremely important case toevery parent in the country," Spence says."The moral and religious issues involvedare enormous. How far can the state go inenforcing its rights over a citizen? Andv/hat control do parents have over theirown children? We're talking about simple

rights. Can they kill a citizen to enforce the rights of the state?"

Those are classic Spence questions—extra-large and••''overloaded—and, ofcourse, he thinks he can answer them.

"Gerr>' Spence really believes that hemakes reality," says an attorney who hasworked closely with him. "He's had longandvery powerfulexperiencedemonstratingthat he canmoldreality; that'swhyhe'sso effective in court."

Spence's colleague, whohasalsoworked.withE Lee Bailey, says, "One very important thing about both men is that becausethey are so strong-willed, they tend to bevery lonely. They know they are in chargeof everytWng that happens around them,sothere isno real reliance upon the goodfaithofother people or on the kindness feltfrom other people."

Does Spence feel lonely? "You're bomalone, and when you die there ain't anybody gonna die with you," he says. "But Ihave many friends in this world, peoplewho love me and who I love. I have plentyof that." Which is true. But there is nogetting around the powerful air of self-sufficiency and essential aloneness thatsometimes emanates from Spence. It is infact a touching thing—a thing that leaksinto his voice for a second, or into hiseyes, whenhe is busy beingGerry Spencethe famous lawv-er, Gerry Spence the manto beat, Gerry Spence the man everybodyhopes will doright by hisenormous talent.Yes,Gerry Spence is alone. He's alone andhe's bigger than life. He's alone and there'snothing he can do about it. He's alone and,finally, he likes it that way. Q