Every first-rate criminal lawyer has a consuming passion: to get his client acquitted. It is a passion that troubles many Americans. If the accused seems to be an obvious crook, how can any honest lawyer fight for his freedom?
No one provides a better answer to that question than Edward Bennett Williams, 46, the country's top criminal lawyer. Williams has passionately defended ex-Teamster Boss Dave Beck, Bernard Goldfine and Adam Clayton Powell, to say nothing of assorted Communists, spies and murderers. Williams helped Jimmy Hoffa beat a bribery rap, got Tax Evader Frank Costello out of prison, opened the mails to the peephole magazine Confidential. Happily for moralists, he is also a loser on occasion: he failed to foil Senate censure of the late Joe McCarthy, and last week he lost the case of Bobby Baker, who was found guilty of, among other things, pocketing $99,600 that California savings-and-loan bankers had handed him as Senate campaign "contributions" (TIME, Feb. 3).
Crucible Test. Disheartened as he was to hear the jury declare Baker a thief, tax evader and conspirator, Williams could not—and did not—complain. The trial confirmed the very creed that drives and goads him. "The Sixth Amendment gave every accused the right to have the assistance of counsel for his defense," says Williams. "The framers did not say every accused except gamblers, thieves and robbers."
The evidence, continues Williams, must be "tested in the crucible of cross-examination." While the accused may not lie, "he is entitled to sit silent and force the proof of guilt." To Williams, guilt is a legal rather than a moral concept: "If you should one day find yourself accused of crime, you would expect your lawyer to raise every defense authorized by the law of the land. Even if you were guilty, you would expect your lawyer to make sure that the Government did not secure your conviction by unlawful means."
Self-compelled to make painstaking preparations, Williams typically slept only four hours a night during the Baker trial. In the courtroom, he is in complete control. He has a computer memory for the remotest dates and details; his material is so well organized that documents flash into his hands like a magician's rabbits. His hair wavy, his calm buttoned down, he cross-examines hostile witnesses with utter courtesy; he seems never to be trying to trip them up, only to help the jury get things straight. He shuns anger: "It's not a useful emotion." Yet in summing up, he pulls all emotional stops: his rhetoric sweeps and soars. Williams is inevitably compared with F. Lee Bailey, a more recently risen criminal lawyer. The main difference between them lies in the cases they handle. Bailey specializes in violence-tinged sensation involving such up-from-nowhere types as Dr. Samuel Sheppard, Carl Coppolino and the Boston Strangler. Williams is more the seeker of equal justice for well-known but scandal-haunted clients.