Clearly, William Kunstler was one of the
most important defense attorneys of this century, he was in a class with
Clarence Darrow and few others. That he was in the Lorriane motel in Memphis
the day before Martin Luther King Jr. would be felled by an assassins bullet,
poised to brief King on various monumental legal matters which would ultimately
define our times, speaks to the fact that he lived on the cutting edge
of radical history. A list of those he vigorously defended in his nearly
five decades as a brilliant courtroom strategist committed to social justice
and social change includes H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X, 1,200 Attica Brothers,
Jack Ruby, El Sayyid Nosair (accused of gunning down Jewish Defense League
founder Rabbi Mayer Kahani), and admitted drug dealer Larry Davis who wounded
six police officers during a south Bronx shoot out. He was a history maker
who impacted in a substantial way on the way we think about law and the
waging of a legal defense.
The following interview was conducted a year ago
at Pacifica station KPFA in Berkeley following the release of Kunstler’s
autobiography, My Life as a Radical Lawyer.
BERSTEIN/LIGHT: Bill Kunstler, let’s start off
with that couch in your office. Tell us about some of the people who sat
on that couch.
KUNSTLER: My kids think that Socrates and Julius
Caesar and Jesus sat on it, but that isn’t true. It’s an old green couch,
coming apart at the seams, that looks like it was made in the 1870s, but
on that couch have sat Marlon Brando and his son; I’ve had H. Rap Brown,
Stokeley Carmichael, Dennis Banks and Russell Means, Val Kilmer, who was
with me in The Doors movie, and many of the Islamic people, including Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman. I’ve had that couch God knows how long, and I can’t
think of every single behind that sat on it, but there are many.
The title of your autobiography is My Life as
a Radical Lawyer. You have defended people who are considered to be some
of the most hated and hateful people by mainstream American society. How
do you define yourself as a radical lawyer?
First of all, that’s not my title; I’m not sure lawyers
who are still within the system have the right to call themselves radical.
I wanted to call it Rebel at the Bar, or Have Writ Will Travel, or "Bill"
of Rights; but the publisher liked that title, so we went with the title.
But many of the people I’ve represented have radical
views, like the Ohio Seven, who decided that the time for violence had
come, with bombs, et cetera, or the Islamic people who really wanted to
put a fatah into operation to help solve the situation in Palestine vis
a vis the Israelis, or others like the Weathermen in Chicago during the
Chicago trial, when they had Days of Rage in October 1969 -- so there are
people I’ve represented who are I guess totally hateful to mainstream America,
who have crossed the line into violence when they figured that nonviolence
would not do the trick.
I went to Bedford Hills penitentiary a few weeks
ago and talked to Kathy Boudin. Kathy had reached a point where she thought,
along with others, that non-violence was ineffective, and that you have
to take the next step, into violence. Now that’s a legitimate thought that
you find in many countries; in fact the United States was born that way
in 1776 when it resorted to the same type of violence, shooting down British
soldiers between Lexington and Concord. So there comes a time in the history
of a country when some people resort to violence. If they succeed they
become heroes, leaders of the new government.
I’d like to get to some of the key trials. But
before we do that, we would like to find out what in your own history,
in your own past growing up, informed you, led you down this path?
It’s hard for me to even answer that question. You
know, I was a terrible kid until I reached high school. My father went
to school, more than I did, to answer teachers who wanted him to know that
I was headed for the penitentiary. When I got into high school something
happened to me and I became an A student, went to Yale, and so on. But
I never could understand why my father charged poor people for medical
attention, sick poor people. I had this out with him many times, and he
said, "You’ll learn when you have mortgages and children and car payments
that you have to do that." But I never had the lure of gold, money, to
spur me on. I guess I had a different style of currency. So it was always
like that, even from the very beginning of my practice I felt like a parasite.
So I guess an accumulation of a lot of psychological factors led me to
say if you’re going to spend your life you might as well do it in stimulating
cases with people who are not run of the mill, and without any hope of
financial reward. I wasn’t going to be bought and sold as most lawyers
are, and that’s the way I’ve done it.
There was also racism that had a profound impact
on you.
Well you know, I ran with a gang when I was a kid,
called the Red Devils. It was a Latino, Black, and Catholic gang. I was
living at Central Park West in a middle class Jewish family background,
middle class Jewish environment. but I didn’t want to be in that crowd
for some reason. So I ran with this gang, you know, we pilfered gum machines
and we broke windows with slingshots, and we formed a baseball team and
a hockey team and so on, but my father kept saying to me, "Why are you
running with this riffraff," you know, with the goyim, as he put it. Why
aren’t you up with your own kind? I couldn’t really explain that. I just
felt more comfortable with them. Then when I was stationed down South during
World War Two initially, in Memphis, Tennessee, in Nashville, and saw the
"Colored Only" and "White Only," it got me all riled up. So when I came
back after the war and went up to Columbia Law School. I was a different
guy than I was when I went into the army. I had seen how racist we were
toward the Japanese. We had seen a film called The Yellow Peril, and I
was as bloodthirsty as the rest. When I got out of the army and began to
reflect on all this I realized I’d been caught up in a whole racist thing
with the yellow people of Japan, they were actually brave soldiers and
were not the animals that were pictured in The Yellow Peril.
Why don’t we start going through some of these
amazing cases that you were a part of. Let’s talk about the Chicago trials.
Was it true in fact that Bobby Seale was bound and gagged at one point?
Tell us about what was going on there.
Well, the trial went on for six months. The government
had assembled a typical platoon of new left figures. They had people from
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), they had the yippies, Jerry and
Abbie; they had old line radical pacifists like Dave Dellinger, and then
they had a black man, Bobby Seale, then chair of the Black Panther Party
for Self Defense, and Bobby was not permitted to have his own lawyer, Charles
Garry. The judge would not delay the trial two weeks so Charlie could recover
from a gall bladder operation. So Bobby would get up in front of the jury
every time cross examination came and say "I have no lawyer and they’d
wouldn’t delay the trial, I m ust do this myself, I’ll cross examine this
witness." Then the judge would say "No, Mr. Kunstler is your lawyer, I
appointed him," and Bobby would say "No, he’s not my lawyer, Charles Garry’s
my lawyer." Finally in October the trial started, if my memory is correct,
25 years ago on the 23rd of September. October 30 the judge lost his cool
and told the marshalls to take Bobby Seale out of the courtroom and do
whatever was necessary. A half hour later the side door of the courtroom
opened and four marshalls came in with a chair in their arms holding him
up in the air, and there was Bobby chained to the chair and bound and gagged.
It was a sight that I never expected to see in an American courtroom. The
symbolism of a black leader bound and gagged in a courtroom was too much
for anyone to bear; it skewered the whole case, and we knew that we could
not lose at that point.
Why don’t you remind us, since it has been 25
years, the origins of that case, what they were facing, and how it became
a symbol of the confrontation between the protest movements that were going
on at that point and the American justice system.
Well, what had happened, you know, the war in Viet
Nam was deepening, American white racism was extremely strong everywhere,
overtly in the deep South and covertly in the North, and so when the Democrats
had their national convention in Chicago -- and they were the people in
power, Johnson was president -- his successor, hand-picked, Hubert Humphrey,
was the nominee of the Democratic party. There was a thought that this
was a proper place to demonstrate against all of these evils. And so the
Festival of Light was organized by the yippies in Lincoln Park. The mobilization
got itself together and was really demonstrating in Grant Park; there were
going to be demonstrations all throughout Chicago. But Eugene McCarthy,
who was then the symbol of peace, warned his people to stay away from Chicago
because the mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, father of the present mayor,
had in April told the police "Shoot to kill, shoot to maim." So McCarthy
got scared and his people stayed away, so barely 5,000 made it to Chicago.
They tried to sleep in the parks, but the mayor wouldn’t give permits,
sent the police in to beat their heads, and a lot of that got on national
television with the injured demonstrators shouting "The whole world is
watching! The whole world is watching!" as the police went berserk. Then
Nixon was elected and he decided he was going to get rid of the new left.
So he had his attorney general John Mitchell indict the eight I mentioned.
He just had the wrong people. He took eight people who were not afraid,
who would demonstrate in and out of the courtroom, and their trial would
be long and involved, and he would lose it in the long run. So it became
a symbol to all Americans who wanted to fight, that this was the way to
do it. Right after the trial ended we had the Seattle Seven who did exactly
the same thing. It gave young people all over the country inspiration and
the counterculture really grew from this. Remember Woodstock occurred in
August 1969, the trial started in September, so we thought it was like
the counterculture was on trial. And it grew to be a great trial, great
people came: Norman Mailer came, Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs.
You know it was a wonderful trial to try to show why people came to Chicago
and what happened to them when they did come.
What are you memories of Judge Hoffman? Because
if the trial symbolized the counterculture and the protest movements being
on trial, he certainly represented the old guard and the establishment.
Judge Hoffman we found out later wasn’t the real
bad guy, he’d been programmed, totally, by the FBI. He was appointed by
Eisenhower after his wife, who was the heir to the Brunswick fortune, gave
a substantial contribution to Eisenhower. He was known as a martinet. Tiny
man, looked and sounded like Mr. Magoo, and he inspired a button we wore
that had his picture on it and said "If you’ve seen one judge you’ve seen
them all."
That would not be the last time that the FBI and
the U.S. national security state would enter the courtroom. It would become
sort of a regular thing, wouldn’t it?
Well, when Senator Church ran his hearings on COINTELPRO,
the FBI’s dirty tricks throughout their history under Hoover clearly surfaced.
One of the devices was to go in and talk to the judge, scare the judge
in criminal trials and get the judge on the FBl’s side, and they certainly
did it with Hoffman.
Take us to Attica. You were there and this was
a terrible situation, there was a prison rebellion and many lives were
at stake.
When the inmates took over, they sent a request to
the authorities that they wanted certain people to come and be an observers
committee so that they would not be killed in the yard and so on. I was
one. There were many on there -- Tom Wicker, columnist for the New York
Times was on the list, Louis Farrakhan was on the list but did not come,
and there were a number of others -- people who became Congressmen, I think,
Herman Padillo and a man named Garcia. There were people who were in politics,
there were newspaper people, Clarence Jones who then ran the Amsterdam
News, etc. The first night they nominated me as their lawyer, all 1,200,
and I agreed to do that, so I had a little different role than the other
observers.
We know that ultimately it turned into a slaughter;
the governor refused to come down, the prisoners wanted him to come down.
What exactly happened there?
Well, it was a miraculous thing to watch. I had all
the white middle-class feelings about convicts, they’re all dangerous people
and so on, no morality, all had committed great crimes. I found out that
they were well organized, that the committee that ruled the rebellion proportionately
represented all the inmates in the yard. Blacks predominated, but there
were Latinos, there were whites, and so on. And that they ran what looked
like sort of an Athenian democracy inside. When we first met with them
we typed out some 30 demands, the ones that were crucial and which were
not accepted were amnesty from criminal prosecution for violent acts and
also from murder -- one of the guards had died. Everyone was heard, they
had a loudspeaker, they got some television cameramen in from the station
in Buffalo, and it ran very smoothly. You had a frenetic situation in that
yard. State troopers were firing rubber pellets; I got hit several times,
and while they don’t really hurt they do bring blood if they hit bare skin;
but we knew that they had us in their sights all the time, the tension
was always rising, but they kept it going until the last day, which of
course was Monday, September 13, 1971 when the governor ordered an assault,
told the inmates through loudspeakers on helicopters to lie down and nothing
would happen to them. But the state troopers ran in with correction officers
yelling "Save me a nigger!" and they just fired this double-O buckshot
all over the yard. Double-O buckshot in the load is 13 to 15 32-calibre
bullets, which just decimate people, and they shot down 29 inmates, and
10 of their own hostages. It was a heavy scene, there was no question about
it.
How much do you think has changed in prison conditions
in this country since the Attica uprising?
I don’t think it’s changed a bit, in fact it’s gotten
worse; we’re becoming a prison-dominated country. All you have to look
at is the new crime bill the president signed a week ago, you’ll see that
it calls for the building of scores of new prison facilities. The only
thing that did change is there were more creature comforts. Attica became
the place, for example, where you had conjugal visits permitted, which
never happened before. And there hasn’t been a single retaking that I know
of a prison in rebellion since that time by the authorities, they’ve all
waited patiently for the situation to subside. Even at the new Mexico penitentiary,
where you had such horrible hacking of prisoners to death by other prisoners.
So that’s been one benefit. But today they’re more overcrowded than ever,
you’re going to have more situations like Attica. So we don’t learn; we
think if we just warehouse them behind these walls that we’ll be safe in
our beds at night.
Let’s talk about a case that raised eyebrows in
New York City, the case of Larry Davis, an alleged drug dealer, who shot
six cops in a shoot-out. In New York City when you shoot cops you go to
jail for a long time. You won the basic aspects of the case. What was at
stake there? How could you possibly successfully defend somebody who shot
six cops?
Well, Larry told us that he was sort of a toady for
the police in New York. Now we know our police department is riddled with
officers who do work in the drug trade, particularly in the ghettoized
barrio areas of the city. Six police officers, all white, I think there
was one Latino in that group, came to talk to Larry at his sister’s apartment
in 1986, and we proved that they came to kill him because he had welshed
on $40,000 of their money, taking it to Norfolk, Virginia and giving it
to a girlfriend to hold. Three weeks before the shoot-out his mother was
told by a police officer that they were going to kill him for that. There
was a hearing on that by our then police complaint review board, which
found that that statement was made to her. The officer who made it was
put on probation for a year. Then three weeks later they came to the apartment,
broke down the door and began firing. He was in the back room. He had a
.45, an ancient shotgun, and he defended himself. They shot a slug into
the room which grazed his temple, he fired back and somehow got out of
that apartment, and then turned himself in a couple weeks later to the
FBI. He pleaded self defense. The jury, after hearing all of the evidence,
how they shot at him, how they had shotguns, how they went to talk to him
with this armed force and so on, they decided that Larry was right, that
he shot in self defense. He wounded a lot of those officers pretty seriously.
I thought it was a good result because I thought maybe it would hold back
the trigger fingers of cops a little to know that one black man in the
whole history of the United States was acquitted on grounds of self defense.
It’s the only case I know of, there probably won’t be another for a long
time. But in any event I thought it was a good case, I thought the jury
was right, and the jury was composed of blacks and whites, Latinos, and
they held that he had defended himself justifiably.
You took quite a beating subsequently, according
to an article I read. You were involved in another court case, and there
was a melee, and you ended up in a jail cell.
I went down to represent C. Vernon Mason, one of
our black lawyers in town, and Al Sharpton in a Brooklyn courtroom, and
the white court officers went berserk. They got me down, kicked me in the
ribs and broke my rib. The officer that did that said, "This is for Larry
Davis," and then they twisted my left leg so severely that I required surgery
and still have pains to this very day. I don’t sue, because I don’t want
to use the system, which I think is corrupt, on my own behalf. I might
use it on behalf of a client, but not myself. I filed a claim and then
didn’t pursue it, but they threw me in the cell and charged me with riot,
and I stayed overnight and then all of a sudden on Saturday at 3:00 in
the afternoon the cell door opened and I was told I could leave.
They threw you in with people who they thought
would give you a good beating, but that didn’t happen, did it?
Well, initially they put me in a room with about
20 black and Latino kids, a room that was hidden from view from the authorities.
I walked in, an elderly gentleman with a briefcase, a little torn up from
the beating, I limped in there and they looked at me very hostilely, you
know, who was this white sonofabitch that was coming in here. Finally I
said, "Gentlemen, I’m Larry Davis’s lawyer. One guy said "Oh, you are,"
he said, "Steven, you give the counselor a seat." One guy got up and gave
me a seat, and then I spent the whole evening giving legal advice to them
for cigarettes.
Another case that has won you death threats and
a great deal of notoriety is the El Sayyid Nosair case. Nosair was accused
of shooting Rabbi Meir Kahane. There were a lot of people who weren’t happy
that you defended Nosair.
Both the JDL, which of course was founded by the
rabbi, and his son is very prominent in it now, and the JDO, the Jewish
Defense Organization. One or the other shot three bullets through the house
after I became associated with the case. I got all sorts of death threats,
bullets in the mail -- and the elevators, some of them at the criminal
courts building in downtown New York where the trial took place, there
were signs in the elevators, scratched in with a coin I guess, saying Death
to Kunstler, Death to Nosair. I was mobbed every time I went in, I had
to be protected by Islamic people, a committee that was formed to protect
us and get us to court and get us out of there. The rabbi’s son attacked
us in court, physically, and at a press conference until our investigator
put him on the floor with a gun to his head and he subsided. So it was
very tense. But I’ve learned that you live with that or you die with it.
You gotta take the good with the bad, there’s a lot of good and there’s
some bad.
It was apparent within the Jewish community that
they were very displeased with hearing this Jewish man defending, they
considered, a rabbi killer. You had gone to the courtroom, I understand,
there was a time when you would greet and say hello, and at one point you
kissed your client, and that caused great concern. What was that about?
I’m always physically demonstrative, you know. You
got hugged, everyone gets hugged, you know, I do it all the time. Shaking
hands seems so cold a way to greet people, particularly people that you’re
fond of or have a relationship with. So I would embrace Nosair quite frequently.
I also thought in the beginning he was guilty, and I guess I felt that
maybe he’d done a good thing in getting rid of Meir Kahane. You know, Meir
Kahane today would be a total physical opponent to the peace efforts in
Israel between the Arabs and the Jews, and he would try to do what Baruch
did in killing the people in the mosque.
But in any event, I’m not against every political
assassination along the way. I don’t advocate it and I don’t promote it,
but when it occurs, and people say to me "You never should be in favor
of that," I always think wouldn’t people have been overjoyed if Hitler
had been assassinated by the generals in their plot to kill him? In any
event, the relationship with Nosair initially was an insanity defense.
I thought he was clearly guilty. Then I looked at the evidence, a videotape
taken just before the assassination. I looked at the fact that no one saw
him shoot the rabbi, that the guns didn’t match. There were all sorts of
shenanigans like no autopsy to show where the bullets came from; that every
witness who said they saw Nosair near the defendant was shown by the videotape
to be lying. The jury asked for that videotape, which shows Nosair leaving
the room just seconds before the assassination. Five times they wanted
it played, frame by frame, and I think that’s what decided the case. So
my attitude changed toward it; I withdrew the insanity plea and we went
on straight reasonable doubt, and the jury, which had on it one very Zionist
woman who also voted to acquit. So the jury was convinced that they had
not proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. They also knew there was another
gun in the room, and there was a lot of dissension between the rabbi and
the man who had the gun in the room over some shenanigans with the rabbi’s
accounts in a Brooklyn bank. So I changed my whole perspective on it.
Why do you take on these cases, and has your mind
ever been changed about the people you defend?
I’ve taken on a lot of pariahs. They may be local
pariahs, like Martin Luther King in the South in which he operated, or
even up in Cicero, Illinois, because I think that the pariahs really set
the course of American civil liberties and civil rights. Justice Frankfurter
once said that the road to civil rights in the United States, and civil
liberties, is paved by cases in which the last names of the defendants
end in vowels. He was saying that all the cases -- Miranda is one particular
on -- in which either Latino or Italian defendats made the law, on many
aspects -- search and seizure, interrogation, and so on. I find that very
true, that the pariahs get the rough treatment, the system violates every
rule of ethics. We just had eight state troopers indicted in New York for
moving a fingerprint card to a crime scene in order to implicate one of
these pariah-type defendants. We know that they will violate the law every
time in order to get a pariah. The World Trade Center case is the prime
example of that. So I think that the place for activist lawyers is with
those people.
How did the assassination of Martin Luther King
and your subsequent involvement in the black power movement change your
life?
I met Martin in Nashville, Tennessee in 1961, and
I had expected to see an Old Testament saint. He asked me to be his special
trial counselor and I agreed. I don’t put Martin on a pedestal; I think
that’s the wrong thing to do with him. He had some drawbacks. He was not
decisive in many areas. But he was a man without malice, and he was a marvelous
speaker. He could say things that in my mouth would be dross, you know,
using all these hyperboles, "the silver sword of justice will cleft the
hills of injustice and let the stream of righteousness pour forth," which
I could never say, but which sounded beautiful when he said it. "I have
a dream," all that type of rhetoric that he used is very effective. I was
out to see him in April 1968 with a lawsuit he had asked us to formulate
on behalf of the striking garbagemen in Memphis, when he was shot and killed,
the shot in the neck that opened the whole side of his face.
You were in the hotel.
I was in the hotel, everybody was in the hotel, you
know. When I heard that he had been killed, I wanted to kill. Boy, there
was a rage in my heart that was second to none. It subsided, finally, but
I can’t describe the feelings I had. He was such a symbol of goodness in
the movement, that to have him slaughtered -- and done really by the FBI,
you know, they gave him such a bad rep -- "He’s the greatest liar in America,"
said J. Edgar Hoover -- that any nut would be stimulated by it, as was
the murderer, James Earl Ray. So really, Ray may have pulled the trigger,
but the one who loaded the gun was the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
You moved into the black power movement. What
was your sense of the difference between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King?
Well, I thought Malcolm was a more important figure,
because he was sort of the cutting edge. I met him a week before he was
killed, at LaGuardia airport. I was with a guy named Mike Felwell who had
been with the fight for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party many years
earlier, and he told us that he had had a conversation with Dr. King, and
that they were going to meet in the future and sort of amalgamate. Malcolm
would do the North, because Martin had failed miserably in Cicero; Martin
would do the South. They thought they would open up the black movement
to a much wider group of people. That very night his house was bombed in
East Elmhurst, Queens, and then a week and a day later he was shot to death
at the Audubon Ballroom. I thought that maybe this agreement, or putative
agreement, had a lot to do with his assassination.
You also have a long history of involvement with
defending the American Indian Movement.
I was one of those kids who grew up in New York where
we had the Museum of Natural History, and I used to be fascinated by the
Indian exhibits in the museum, particularly an Indian war canoe. But I
never realized what was happening to Native Americans until Philadelphia,
when Frank Rizzo’s police shot and killed a man named Leroy Shenandoah,
one of the steel workers working on buildings in Philadelphia, when a mattress
fell down accidentally during the filming of a Hollywood movie. It fell
from the balcony of the Colonial Hotel in which they lived. I tried that
case, and it got me the attention of Oren Lyons, who was the chief of the
Onendaga, and AIM took over Wounded Knee in February 1973. I was called
by Oren, would I go out there? I became the chief negotiator between the
Indians who were occupying this hamlet. That experience got me deep into
Indian lore. I read everything I could. When Dennis Banks and Russell Means
were arrested and charged with a conspiracy, they asked me to represent
Russell. I spent nine months in St. Paul trying this case, which resulted
in dismissal for government misconduct, great victory.
What was the misconduct?
Oh, it was so extensive, the wiretapping, the Indians
talking with their lawyers, putting witnesses on who said they saw Russell
and Dennis shoot a marshall. The witness was, at the very moment he said
he watched this, on a television station out here in Palo Alto, seeking
funds, a man named Louie Movescamp. And so on. The judge found a myriad
of stuff. On appeal we held the victory, and Dennis and Russell were never
tried. Then I defended two Indians accused of killing two FBI agents, a
year later, on the Palute Indian reservation. I’ve weaved in and out of
the Indian community, mainly in the Southwest and Northwest, for the last
20 or so years.
When I last spoke to Bill Kunstler he had just "escaped"
from a New York City hospital where surgeons had implanted a pace maker
in his heart. He was heading for Philadelphia as an organizing sponsor
of the rally to save the life of death row journalist, Mumia Abu Jamal.
He sounded tired, but spirited. It was just after Jerry Garcia died, and
I jokingly asked him if he was a Dead head. He said his strongest memory
of the Dead was before a concert when Abbie Hoffman slipped him a tab of
LSD and everything after than became a wonderful blur.
What is also wonderful was Bill’s way of being that
combined political action with great personal courage. Waves of us over
several generations have been carried into belief by Bill’s unrelenting
commitment and devotion to putting the criminal justice system on trial
even as he did his effective legal work inside a system he despised, a
system in which money buys justice and poverty goes to jail.
William Moses Kunstler died on Labor Day at age 76
of a heart attack. But I assure you it was a purely technical matter. He
never lost hope, and the heart he brought to his work was huge, and was
never lost to paralyzing bitterness or cynicism. Bill’s good heart will
go on beating in many of us for a long time to come. -- Dennis Bernstein
