A few weeks ago, Lawyer Percy Foreman wearily confided to a friend that James Earl Ray would be his last client in a criminal case. From now on, said Foreman, he would confine his activities to only a few civil suits. "I am 66 years old," he explained, "and I don't need money. So why should I expose myself to the agony of criminal cases?" Last week, however, after successfully copping a controversial plea for Ray, Foreman was obviously feeling perkier; he denied categorically that he had any notion of retiring from criminal practice.
No matter what he does, Foreman already has established for himself a permanent place in the legal profession's hall of fame. "There is no better trial lawyer in the U.S. than me," he says unblushingly. And he may well be right. During a career covering more than 40 years, he has served as defense counsel in at least 1,500 capital cases in hometown Houston and other cities. By his own count, a mere 64 of his clients were sentenced to prison and only one was executed. That was a convicted killer named Steve Mitchell, who Foreman still insists was "as sweet and kind a person as ever lived."
Without Laughter. In the courtroom, Percy comes across at first as a fit figure for ridicule—a shambling hulk (6 ft. 4 in., 250 Ibs.) of a man with baggy pants. But his opponents know better than to laugh. Foreman combines a superbly skilled legal mind with a brilliant sense of showmanship. In one case, he defended a woman who had killed her husband, a cattleman, because he had flogged her with a whip. As he addressed the jury, Foreman kept picking up the long black whip from the counsel table and cracking it ferociously. By the time he was through, the jury seemed willing to award the lady a Medal of Honor.
Another Foreman client was a woman named Mahotah Muldrow. She and her husband got into an argument; he belted her around a bit. Thereupon she shot him five times and then left him for dead in the front yard. She drove" herself to the police station to turn herself in but, for some reason, changed her mind and went back home. There, in the presence of several neighbors, who by now had gathered around Mr. Muldrow's body, Mahotah fired a sixth shot. Foreman won an acquittal by convincing the jury that the first five shots had been fired in self-defense and that the sixth was 1) the result of some sort of nervous reaction, and 2) had missed.
A favorite Foreman tactic is to argue that a murder victim was a rascal who badly needed killing. That was part of his strategy in the celebrated 1966 mariticide trial of Candy Mossler in Miami. Foreman repeated time and again that the late Jacques Mossler had been a "depraved" sexual deviate who might have been killed by any number of people.