"One of the things he taught me is, you don?t know if you?ll get away with something unless you try it.?- defense attorney Dwight Doskey
Clyde Merritt doesn't have much of a defense left. An inveterate New Orleans public defender, Merritt has represented criminal clients across five decades, trundling up and down the steps of Tulane and Broad probably more than anyone alive.
But now, at 82, he spends his days far from the courthouse bustle.
Stricken by terminal cancer, Merritt mostly rests in bed in a darkened room in Lakeview, wearing a scraggly gray beard, a pair of dark dress socks and a tube that runs from his stomach to a metal support stand where a plastic Frank Sinatra doll hangs from a twist-tie around the waist.
His bed faces a flat-screen TV and a bookshelf packed with legal texts and journals -- tools of a trade that he practiced on behalf of poor defendants for 38 years, and with the state as a prosecutor for 11 more before then.
He's got "a month or two" to live, Merritt figures.
"I already miss it, I guess: The camaraderie. Free coffee. Seeing the excitement of parties at the bench, sitting in trial, seeing I could do it from experience," Merritt said. "I spent more hours in the courts and my office than anyplace."
Bad news came in February, when the Orleans Parish public defender's office laid off Merritt and 20 other lawyers in a sweeping budget purge that left him incensed.
Worse, he said, came in mid-April, when Merritt, a self-described "world-class" smoker, was diagnosed with tongue cancer and leukemia.
"My head hurts. My throat hurts," Merritt said. "Nothing feels good anymore."
A few weeks ago, a group of former colleagues and judges gathered at the house, where his ex-wife and the mother of his three sons, Mary Lou Merritt, now cares for him.
The public defender's office presented him with an award, "in recognition of commitment and fight for the cause of indigent defense." The office plans to bestow the Clyde Merritt Award annually.
"What can you say? Being lauded for your work after a long time -- I'm honored," Merritt said. "I can rejoice and say I did my share."
Stories of Merritt's devotion to the job flow freely among longtime courthouse denizens. Merritt, who started out as an accountant, began working under then-District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1966, following a two-year stint as an Army draftee in the Korean War and four years at Loyola Law School.
He was among the prosecution team that helped Garrison ready the 1969 case against Clay Shaw for an alleged conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. In the meantime, he prosecuted numerous criminal cases under Garrison.
"When you went from the courthouse to jail, they called that Merritt row, because every person in there was convicted by my dad," said Darren Merritt, one of his sons.
But when Harry Connick beat Garrison in a 1973 election, Merritt left the office for criminal defense work.
"My dad refused to work for Harry Connick. My dad and Jim Garrison were best friends," Darren Merritt said. "He said, 'I'm going to be your nemesis and practice law on the other side,' and he stayed there his whole career."
Merritt said he started working in public defense at the start of 1974, "decided I could do it much better," and until this year never stopped.
For years, Merritt lived on South Dupre Street, two blocks from the courthouse. It was a shotgun double, with an office in front and living quarters in the back. Merritt, friends said, would shag case files from home to the courthouse.
"Clyde won more murder cases in the 70's and early 80's than any other lawyer in Louisiana, probably America. He was that good," said former Criminal District Judge Calvin Johnson, who started as Merritt's gofer and considered him a mentor.
"We had gone through at that time six or seven of these cases. He literally won every one of them. Now we have this one the guy was found guilty. I was astounded. I just walked out the court, sat on the bench. I had tears coming out of my eyes. Clyde comes up there, looks at me and says, 'What's wrong with you? He was guilty. What the hell's wrong with you?' That was my wake-up call to the law."
Johnson described Merritt as "always the disheveled, incoherent man and lawyer."
Colleagues said they once found Merritt roaming the 7th floor office at 9 p.m. on a Friday night in his pajamas, with a dog on a leash, looking for statute books that he would line with handwritten notes.
"You doing all right? Say yeah," was his standard greeting around the office.
"He always had stains on his clothes from food and he'd be dropping ashes from the cigarettes onto them," said defense attorney Dwight Doskey, who worked at the public defender's office with Merritt for 27 years.
"He always would be telling how he got a great buy on a suit from some guy at Tulane and Carrollton selling suits for $50 out of the trunk of his car."
But Merritt's dedication to the law went unquestioned, colleagues said. His passion, often laced with courtroom vitriol, drew plenty of attention. Several former colleagues say judges held him in contempt perhaps more than any attorney in the building.
For years, Merritt complained about the instructions that judges gave juries, constantly arguing that their definition of reasonable doubt was overly restrictive. Ultimately, the Lousiana Supreme Court agreed, in a 1992 decision.
"Everybody laughed at me, and then the Supreme Court set a very strong rule," Merritt said, with more than a tinge of pride. "It upset the balance of law for awhile."
In court, Merritt unleashed dramatic, sometimes outlandish closing arguments, friends said. His son, Darren, likens him to the Al Pacino character in the 1979 courtroom drama "And Justice for All," shouting and flailing for a client, and for effect.
"He was not just insulting. His hair was always wild. He'd be prancing up and down in front of the jury. One of the things he taught me is, you don't know if you'll get away with something unless you try it," Doskey said.
"Clyde was a real firebrand, and lots of judges disliked him, but everybody respected him. "They knew everything he did he was doing because he believed in it. He was never doing it because they were paying him a dollar."
Indeed, many did not. While in private practice -- public defenders in New Orleans were technically part-timers until few years ago -- Merritt had a rough time paying the bills because of how often he'd work for free, Doskey said.
Merritt stuck around after Hurricane Katrina, working for criminal defendants in the makeshift jail at the Greyhound bus station.
"He was married to his job more than his family," said Mary Lou Merritt.
Johnson cited his mentor's tenacity, and a confounding style that he used to his advantage.
"He always had that 'Columbo' kind of thing, mumbling, stumbling and seeming as if he's not all with it, when in fact he's very, very focused," Johnson said. "Clyde is one of those true believers. He is very combative. He was an amateur boxer. That was one of the things in his personality. He wanted to always be in the fight. But on the other side of it, Clyde believed in the law, in the dignity of the law. He had no problem being held in contempt and sitting in jail for a client."
Merritt credits his gravitation toward criminal defense to his Irish heritage and growing up "a poor man's son," to a father who lost his farm in the Great Depression.
When he took a break, which was rare, he'd fish out at his lakeside camp on Chef Menteur Highway.
Now he goes nowhere, rarely leaving the bed except for physical therapy sessions twice a week.
"I guess I could if I wanted," he said. "I haven't recently."
Even as he lies in bed, Merritt retains a feisty disdain for dysfunction in the courthouse -- seeing a major problem?in the distribution of cases among judges.
"Everybody can't be full of energy and desire, with the enthusiasm it takes to be a good judge. They're human beings," he said. "And the good ones have no dockets."
Merritt thinks judges shouldn't be elected -- "You can buy 'em off any way you want," he says -- and he doesn't see much improvement in the most recent crop.
Nor is he much fond of District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who sat on the bench for 16 years.
"I got more reversals in his courtroom than any other courtroom," Merritt said. "Cannizzaro and I were never friends."
At one point, Merritt said, he was offered a judgeship. Merritt said he turned it down, knowing that he would refuse to put marijuana scofflaws and other low-level convicts in jail, and would thus incur the wrath of higher courts.
"He would never have been able to curb his tongue," Doskey said. "It would have been a disaster in so many ways."
Merritt isn't happy about being laid off. He says he thinks the stress of it may have brought on his illness. In the last few years, however, he had suffered some falls and became less stable, his son said. Merritt said he knew it was coming.
"I was making too much money for so little production," he said. "I offered to work for a cut, but they didn't want to hear it."
The diagnosis came two months later. Recently, Merritt told Mary Lou that he didn't expect to make it to Christmas.
Time and money have just about run out on him.
"I didn't believe I'd ever be off of the job," Merritt said. "I'll be dead in the next two months. I'm broke. I'm ready for this. I've lived a hell of a life."
Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/11/diehard_orleans_parish_defense.html
demi moore roy oswalt kevin martin 2012 senior bowl chuck series finale welcome back kotter 2001 a space odyssey
No comments:
Post a Comment