Review of Legal Resources
| Publication year | 1995 |
| Pages | 2325 |
1995, October, Pg. 2325. Review of Legal Resources
To read this book is to travel through the 1960s and 1970s with a lawyer who represented an astonishingly large number of people and moments in those turbulent decades. William Kunstler has, over the past thirty-five years, been involved in his law practice with virtually every protest movement in this country: civil rights, Freedom Riders, anti-war protesters, prison riots, Wounded Knee, and Muslims. He has known, as a lawyer and as a friend, Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, Bobby Seale, Lenny Bruce, Adam Clayton Powell, and Leonard Pettier. His practice in the late 1980s and early 1990s involved him with defendants in the Rabbi Meir Kahane murder case and the World Trade Center bombing case. His professional and personal life was a living embodiment of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement: "As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived."
Kunstler dates his personal radicalization from the trial of the Chicago Eight (or Seven, as Bobby Seales' charges were severed), which began in 1969. As a veteran of the Freedom Rider legal battles, Kunstler was not new to highly politicized courtroom settings, but the theatrics and underlying causes of this trial changed his way of looking at the judicial system. Until then, he believed injustice below would be reversed on appeal (indeed, his four-year sentence for contempt by Judge Hoffman in that trial was reversed on appeal, perhaps due to the weight of the 500-plus-page brief filed on his behalf). In Chicago, as he saw it, he faced a malevolent judge, prosecutors who withheld crucial exculpatory evidence, and a government bent on suppressing all anti-war protest. He saw the courtroom thereafter as a forum for advancing or defending a cause, as opposed to solely defending a client, and he took the offensive in every way possible---with cultivation of the press and dramatic courtroom tactics his favored avenues of attack. At sentencing in the Chicago trial, he begged to go to jail with his clients to show his contempt for the system. "My life has come to nothing. I am not anything anymore. You have destroyed me and everybody else. Put me in jail now. Come to mine (sentencing) now, Judge, please. I beg you. Come to mine. Do me, too. I don't want to be left out."
Kunstler includes occasional references to the people within the system who have his respect. Judge Elbert Tuttle of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals gets high praise, as do Justice Harvey Blackman and a federal prosecutor who urged that Daniel Berrigan be allowed to recite The Lord's Prayer before the jury. However, on the whole, Kunstler remains severely critical of the justice system. At a New York State Judicial Conference in 1993, in what surely must rank among the more obvious invitations to self-inflicted wounds of that year, Kunstler said in his invited remarks to the assembled judges:
I've listened to all of you tonight, and what I've heard is a lot of misinformation. I heard one judge say the judiciary is the only branch that really defends the Constitution. Another said that all the judges work hard and are sincere and don't let their personal ideologies get into it. That is all so much hogwash. I don't believe it, and I don't want my silence at those remarks to be interpreted as agreeing with any of this poppycock.
Their mouths were hanging open as I continued:
Judges are creatures of the Establishment. They do what's politically correct for them. The worst of them are mean-spirited, racist bastards. As for defending the Constitution, they probably violate it more than any other branch of government.
After my speech, I was surrounded by a passel of judges who said, "Well, you've certainly got guts," and other similar remarks. I...
To continue reading
Request your trial