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> Chicago's Barry Kroll, 30, is a 1960 Michigan Law graduate who got his first legal experience in the Army, arguing 300 military appeals cases. Out of the Army in 1962, Kroll joined a Chicago law firm and found himself picked off a bar list to handle one of the most important confession cases in U.S. legal historyEscobedo v. Illinois. Last June the Supreme Court upheld Kroll's argument, ruling that the right to counsel begins when police start grilling a suspect (see following story). Kroll got no fee, agreed to work entirely apart from his law-firm job. "Do it again?" he says. "I'll do one a week. It was the greatest experience I've ever had." > Chicago's Donald P. Moore, 35, was a top-of-his-class (Illinois, '56) candidate for Wall Street, but chose to work for local indigents instead. In 1957 he took on Emil Reck, a feeble-minded murder defendant serving 99 years on the basis of a coerced confession. Moore spent four no-fee years fighting to a Supreme Court victory that freed Reck. In 1961 he won another Supreme Court decision permitting a Chicago Negro family to sue in federal court for unlawful police invasion of their home. The family collected enough to pay Moore 600 an hour for his four years' work. Meanwhile, he and his law partner had gone broke. Undaunted, Moore next worked round the clock for Paul Crump, the remarkably rehabilitated murderer in Cook County jail's death row. In 1962 Moore got Crump's sentence commuted to 199 years. Still in debt, he has switched to lawyering for the Justice Department's Criminal Division in Washington. Says he: "I feel lucky, going broke on the things I did." Chicago's Walter Fisher, 73, a patrician partner in a patrician law firm, was asked by the Supreme Court in 1956 to represent Illinois Indigent Alphonse Bartkus in a classic double-jeopardy case. Charged with bank robbery, Bartkus had been acquitted in a federal courtthen convicted of the same crime in a state court. Fisher soon produced a highly impressive brief for Life Prisoner Bartkus. Reluctantly, the Supreme Court twice rejected his arguments on the grounds that Americans must obey both state and federal courts, but the Illinois legislature was so impressed that it passed laws preventing any repeat of the Bartkus case. In 1960 Fisher got the now wholly rehabilitated Bartkus a pardoncompleting roughly $75,000 worth of free legal service. "This case," Fisher insisted, "is important for freedom in this country." Detroit's Albert Best, 39, is a former Sunday editor of the Detroit News who switched to law largely because of fascination with constitutional rights. Best spends about one-quarter of his time defending indigentsfor example, Lee Walker, a Detroit Negro who in 1954 walked into a police station to report his car stolen. Walker was promptly locked up for "routine investigation" of a month-old murder, eventually signed a confession that he says was beaten out of him. He was sentenced to life. After four years' devotion to what he calls "this vicious case," Best recently persuaded the Michigan Supreme Court to order a precedent-setting hearing on the voluntariness of Walker's confession. Walker lost. "Appalled," Best is now honing a new appeal that may set another Michigan precedent. Already he has done
