(3 of 3)
at least $10,000 worth
of free work for Walker. Says he: "It's a matter of conscience—mine."
— Washington's William B. Bryant, 53, a former U.S. prosecutor, is one
of the capital's ablest criminal lawyers and its best-known volunteer
defender. In 1957, Bryant saved Confessed Rapist Andrew Mallory from
death by winning a unanimous Supreme Court decision that federal
prisoners must be arraigned without delay. Mallory, probably insane,
had been grilled for 71 hours. After Mallory, capital police changed
tactics. If a prisoner confessed during long detention, he was asked to
repeat himself next day as if confessing for the first time. Lawyer
Bryant tackled that one in the 1960 case of James Killough, a confessed
wife killer who had been grilled in stages of 13 and two hours. Last
year Bryant finally won a U.S. Court of Appeals decision that tossed
out Killough's confession and freed him for lack of other evidence.
"It's not our obligation to get people acquitted," says Bryant, "but to
see that the rules mean something."
— Los Angeles' Al Matthews, 58, finished law school determined to
become a rich corporation lawyer, but in one of his first cases he
sprang a life prisoner falsely accused of a series of sex offenses.
Soon besieged by hopeful cons, Matthews recalls that "hundreds of
people lied to me like dogs. Usually they were guilty." But in 1945 he
spent $3,000 of his own to save an accused murderer from death,
continued toiling for such other indigents as Caryl Chessman, whom he
still believes innocent of the sex attack that sent him to the gas
chamber. For a while, Matthews' "aversion to the innocent being
convicted" left him hardly more affluent than his indigent clients. He
now makes $50,-000 a year in private criminal practice, gives away
great chunks of it, takes many cases without fee. Says he: "What good
is money anyway? I believe, like Daniel Webster, that a lawyer should
work hard, live well and die poor."
