Dollree Mapp, Who Defied Police Search in Landmark Case,

John Doar, Federal Lawyer in Battle Against Segregation

John Doar, who was a leader in the federal government’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation in the South during the most volatile period of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and who returned to government service to lead the team that made the constitutional case for the impeachment of President Richard M. Nixon, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Robert said.

Mr. Doar prosecuted some of the most notorious cases of murder and violence in the South in the ’60s, and was instrumental in changing the region’s pattern of race-based politics based on voter discrimination. In 1974 Mr. Doar, a Republican, was named chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.

Lawrence E. Walsh, Iran-contra special prosecutor

Rick Bowmer/AP - Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh speaks to reporters in Washington in 1989.

Lawrence E. Walsh, a New York corporate lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials who as independent counsel prosecuted several key players in the Reagan-era Iran-contra scandal only to see the convictions overturned on appeal and many other officials pardoned, died March 19 at his home in Nichols Hills, Okla. He was 102. His death was confirmed by Kevin Gordon, president of the Crowe & Dunlevy law firm, with which Mr. Walsh had been associated. The cause was not immediately available.

I always had respect for him; he stood up to the Reagan gang. But, with all due respect, at age 102, the cause of death might well have been age.

Mr. Walsh began his career as a Depression-era racket buster under New York District Attorney Thomas E. Dewey in the late 1930s and later served as a federal district judge in New York and deputy attorney general of the United States. He also was a president of the American Bar Association. He spent most of his career as a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell, one of the most powerful law firms in the country, where he did civil litigation for such corporate clients as AT&T, R.J. Reynolds and General Motors. In 1969, he served briefly as deputy to chief negotiator Henry Cabot Lodge during peace talks with North Vietnamese communists. In retirement, Mr. Walsh gained his greatest public profile. On Dec. 19, 1986, then-Attorney General Edwin Meese III appointed him special prosecutor to launch an inquiry into what at the time was considered the worst government scandal since Watergate. Mr. Walsh spent nearly seven years and $39 million as the special prosecutor in the Iran-contra scandal.

The investigation would conclude that the administration of President Ronald Reagan had illegally sold arms to Iran to win the release of U.S. hostages in the Middle East and had given the proceeds, in defiance of Congress, to a rebel group known as the “contras,” who were fighting to overthrow the Marxist government of Nicaragua. Congress also created a joint investigative committee, which many thought would lead to Reagan’s impeachment.

The Iran-contra affair led to the dismissal of the president’s national security adviser, Navy Adm. John M. Poindexter, and Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, the National Security Council staff aide accused of masterminding the scheme.

Poindexter and North were among 14 officials who faced criminal charges. They also were among the 11 convicted, although their convictions were set aside by appellate court decisions. Five — including former State Department official Elliott Abrams and former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger — were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992.

Mr. Walsh concluded that there was “no credible evidence” that Reagan broke the law but that the president set the stage for the illegal activities of others.

Even though no one went to jail in the long-running inquiry, Mr. Walsh told The Washington Post in 1991 that the probe of what he called a “national security crime” was important in the long term. “Jail sanctions are important, and they would have been justified in several of the cases we brought, but the deterrent effect is there from the conviction itself,” he said.

Randolph Thrower, I.R.S. Chief Who Resisted Nixon

Randolph W. Thrower in 1969. Credit United Press International

 

Randolph W. Thrower, a Republican lawyer who headed the Internal Revenue Service under President Richard M. Nixon from 1969 to 1971 before losing his job for resisting White House efforts to punish its enemies through tax audits, died March 8 at his home in Atlanta. He was 100.  

 

Mr. Thrower’s unusual legal background — as a federal tax law expert and a lawyer for death row inmates in Georgia, most of them black, in the Jim Crow era — helped garner wide support from lawyers’ groups and lawmakers when Nixon nominated him for I.R.S. commissioner.

And though his tenure was short, he was instrumental in two historic overhauls of American tax policy: revoking the tax-exempt status of private schools that excluded blacks, and passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which he helped draft. The legislation eliminated some loopholes for the rich and exempted many poor people from federal taxes altogether.

 

 

But it was not Watergate that haunted Mr. Thrower; it was the case of Will Coxson, a black teenager convicted in the late 1930s of raping a white woman in Marietta, Ga., and sentenced to die. Mr. Thrower took the case on appeal in 1940 and discovered that Mr. Coxson’s alibi was solid and that the victim’s initial description of her attacker as “a light-skinned black man” had changed significantly when the prosecution brought the case to trial. Mr. Coxson was dark-skinned.

The Georgia Supreme Court ordered a hearing on whether Mr. Coxson had received adequate representation, and Mr. Thrower was preparing for that when he left to join the Marines. Turning the case over to another lawyer, he said, he felt sure that the evidence would sustain an appeal all the way to the United States Supreme Court if necessary and win Mr. Coxson’s freedom. But the case “withered on the vine,” he said, and while Mr. Thrower was serving in the Pacific, Mr. Coxson was executed.

“For the past 60 years, no case has kept me awake at night as much as this,” he said in a 2001 lecture, “wondering what else I might have done to save the life of this young man. His life should not have been taken.”

 

Robert S. Strauss, Presidential Confidant and Deal Maker

Photo

Robert S. Strauss with his boss, President Jimmy Carter, after a signing ceremony for the Trade Act of 1979, which Mr. Strauss pushed as the special representative for trade negotiations. Credit Dennis Cook/Associated Press 

 

Robert S. Strauss, who rose from the Texas Plains to become an influential Washington insider, leading the Democratic Party and hopscotching among White House posts when not making millions as a lobbyist and deal maker, died Wednesday. He was 95.

His law firm, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, confirmed his death.

Mr. Strauss was known for a quick wit and a rough-hewn persuasiveness that recalled his small-town roots and enhanced his prowess among a vanishing breed of back-room power brokers. His knowledge, contacts and instincts — running across parties and administrations — ran so deep that he was almost invariably included in the tiny, powerful fraternity known as Washington’s “wise men.” He called himself a “centrist, a worker, a doer, a putter-together.”

It was Mr. Strauss whom Nancy Reagan asked to tell her husband, President Ronald Reagan, that the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages scandal was corroding his administration and that he had to make changes. It was Mr. Strauss whom President George Bush in 1991 appointed ambassador to the Soviet Union, even after he told the president that he had never voted for him for anything. Mr. Strauss became ambassador to the newly non-Communist Russian Federation.

Bob Woodward wrote in his book “Shadow: Five Presidents and the Legacy of Watergate” (1999) that when some Republican leaders in the House of Representatives were having second thoughts about impeaching President Bill Clinton, they turned to Mr. Strauss to ask other Republican leaders to consider censure instead.

Through the law firm he co-founded — Akin, Gump — Mr. Strauss deftly navigated the territory where business and government intersect and deals are made. Over Thanksgiving dinner in 1990 at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, he brokered final details of Matsushita Electric’s takeover of MCA for $6.6 billion. His reported $8 million fee was split between both sides, because he had represented both.

If anything, that  typifies his ilk (for better and for worse).

In April 1979 Mr. Strauss became Mr. Carter’s personal representative to the Middle East peace talks, which then concerned Palestinian autonomy in the Israeli-occupied territories. Years later, speaking to The Los Angeles Times, an unidentified friend quoted Mr. Strauss’s response to getting the assignment.

“The first thing I’m going to do is go to Israel and court Premier Begin’s wife like she was an 18-year-old schoolgirl,” Mr. Strauss said, according to the friend, referring to Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

“Then I’ll go to Egypt and court Sadat’s wife the same way,” he continued, referring to President Anwar el-Sadat. Before long, Mr. Strauss predicted, “one of those ladies is going to turn around in bed to her husband and say: ‘You know, that little Bobby Strauss is not such a bad guy. Why don’t you do something nice for him?’ ”

Condom Judge

A Hewlett patron asked me for help in copying this obit. I did so, but the edge was cut off, so I walked back to this computer and printed it. After passing over the printout, I started to read the obit. Fascinating.

Justice Gustin L. Reichbach, who went from the carefree fraternity life to leading student protests at Columbia University in 1968 and then to a career as a fiercely independent lawyer and judge, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 65. The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Ellen Meyers, said.

 Across six decades of myriad public incarnations, Justice Reichbach occupied buildings at Columbia as a student, won a court case that helped legalize residential loft life in SoHo and TriBeCa, blasted a state agency from the bench for ignoring Medicaid fraud and served as a judge on a war-crimes tribunal in Kosovo.

Elected to the New York State Supreme Court in 1999, he decorated his courtroom with pictures of Paul Robeson, Clarence Darrow and striking coal miners, as well as a neon sign showing the scales of justice.

Justice Reichbach was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 9, 1946, and grew up in Flatbush, one of two sons of a machinist who organized unions. After graduating from Midwood High School, he attended the State University at Buffalo, where he was the president of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a Jewish fraternity. As the Vietnam War was escalating, the arrival of an R.O.T.C. military recruiting office on campus awoke a radical spirit in Mr. Reichbach, said Daniel L. Alterman, a friend who attended Buffalo with him.

 His engagement with radical politics gathered force when he was admitted to Columbia University School of Law. A classmate, Bruce Ratner, now a real estate developer, recalled meeting him as they stood in line to pay tuition in September 1967. “This guy with long blond curly hair, almost white, started talking to me with a Brooklyn accent that sounded like it was right out of ‘On the Waterfront’ and asked me if I’d found a place to stay,” Mr. Ratner said. By the time they reached the front of the line, Mr. Ratner invited him to crash in his apartment on 103rd Street. 

In court, Justice Reichbach wore robes only on sentencing days. A white scarf usually accented his three-piece suits, along with a Phi Beta Kappa key from his undergraduate days. His curly mane lost none of its exuberance as it grayed. 

James F. Neal, litigated historic cases

James F. Neal, a lawyer who found success in nationally prominent cases on both sides of the legal battlefield, prosecuting Jimmy Hoffa and the Watergate conspirators and defending the Ford Pinto, the Exxon Valdez, the filmmaker John Landis, Elvis Presley’s doctor and Vice President Al Gore, died on Thursday in Nashville. He was 81. A Southerner who was described as having a country affect but a big-city swagger — “I remember hearing someone say he could strut sitting down,” his wife said — Mr. Neal was not long out of law school when he joined the Justice Department in 1961 as a special assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Quite a roster of clients.

In May 1973, Mr. Neal was in private practice in Nashville when he was asked by the Watergate special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, to join his staff. He worked with Mr. Cox until October 1973, when John W. Dean III, President Richard M. Nixon’s former legal counsel, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and agreed to be a prosecution witness in the cover-up trial of five Watergate figures. Mr. Cox was subsequently ordered dismissed by Nixon, and his successor, Leon Jaworski, asked Mr. Neal to return for the cover-up case.

Nuremberg Nazi Tribunals Prosecutor

* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 22, 2010, 10:22 P.M. ET

Whitney Harris : 1912-2010
Prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg Tribunals


By STEPHEN MILLER

Whitney Harris prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the postwar Nuremberg tribunals and represented the prosecution at the hanging of 10 convicted war criminals on Oct. 16, 1946.

Mr. Harris, who died Wednesday at age 97, was one of the last surviving members of the team of Nuremberg prosecutors. He later wrote a legal history of the tribunal, "Tyranny on Trial." The trials broke new legal ground by establishing categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Washington University in St. Louis



At Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945, Mr. Harris investigated crimes against humanity by high-ranking Nazis. He elicited from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess an estimate that "at least 2.5 million" victims had been murdered in the concentration camp, mostly Jews. (Most historians accept a lower number.)

"Hoess was a very unimpressive individual, he looked like a clerk at a grocery store, he didn't look like a big Nazi or murderer or anything like that, but he was responsive to my questions," Mr. Harris said during a 1995 visit to the Nuremberg courtroom, on the 50th anniversary of the trials. Among other atrocities, Hoess under interrogation took credit for introducing Zyklon B, normally a pesticide, as the killing agent in gas chambers.

Described by author Joseph Persico as a "Navy officer and lawyer whose film-star handsomeness belied a serious character," Mr. Harris was raised in Seattle and said he attended law school because jobs were scarce during the Depression. After practicing law in Los Angeles for a few years, he joined the Navy as an officer during World War II.

After the German surrender, he was posted to Europe, where he became assistant to Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and an associate justice on the Supreme Court. It was Mr. Jackson who in his opening statement called the Nuremberg tribunal "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."

Working in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Mr. Harris set to work collecting documentary evidence against Erst Kaltenbrunner, the head of Reich security, including the Gestapo secret police, at the end of the war.

"I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide," Mr. Harris told Der Spiegel magazine in 2005. "We didn't have much solid evidence when we started."

In the course of his investigation, Mr. Harris discovered and interrogated SS Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppen D, who admitted on the stand that his soldiers had conducted 90,000 executions of men, women and children, mostly Jews, in the Ukraine and Crimea.

Mr. Harris also assisted in Mr. Jackson's cross-examination of German air force chief Hermann Goering, who was sentenced to death but managed to take cyanide in his cell the night before the execution. Mr. Harris attended the executions of Mr. Kaltenbrunner and nine others as the representative of Mr. Jackson.

After the war, Mr. Harris taught law at Southern Methodist University and then became a corporate attorney for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. He also had a private practice and was a member of the Supreme Court bar.

He was a founder of the Committee of Former Nuremberg Prosecutors for a Permanent International Criminal Court.

"These were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose, and we did get the evidence, and we were able to do so," Mr. Harris said during the 1995 Nuremberg trip.

Manager of Stars, Big Fan of Lawsuits

Herb Cohen managed seminal rock and pop acts of the 1960s and '70s including Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Tom Waits, and Linda Ronstadt. But Mr. Cohen's wildest act may have been his own, as a fireplug-shaped music-business eminence with a reputation for litigiousness.

Herb Cohen in February 1971. He managed stars including Frank Zappa.

Mr. Cohen, who died March 16 at age 78, was a progenitor of the Los Angeles folk-music scene in the 1950s. His Unicorn Coffee House, where patrons could take a banjo down from the wall and entertain the crowd, was reputedly the first institution of its kind south of San Francisco.

In the 1960s Mr. Cohen began managing acts, starting with the Modern Folk Quartet and then the Mothers. With Mr. Zappa, he founded record labels including Straight, Bizarre and DiscReet, which released albums by Captain Beefheart, Alice Cooper, the Amboy Dukes (Ted Nugent's early outfit), and the comic Lenny Bruce. He later ran a music publishing company, Third Story Music.

Mr. Cohen "wasn't one to coddle his artists," says Ms. Ronstadt, whom Mr. Cohen signed after watching her sing at an open microphone night at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles. "He didn't let me get caught up with my reflection in the mirror."

Mr. Cohen's relations with his biggest stars—Mr. Zappa, Mr. Waits, Ms. Ronstadt—all ended with lawsuits, although in Ms. Ronstadt's case a friendship was salvaged. "Something always went wrong at the end," says Jac Holzman, founder of Elektra Records, who released recordings by another of Mr. Cohen's clients, Tim Buckley.

Raised in the Bronx, N.Y., Mr. Cohen was the son of a veteran of the Russian Revolution. After stints in the merchant marine and the Army, Mr. Cohen moved to the West Coast. In the mid-1950s, he moved in folk-music circles, befriending singers Odetta and Theodore Bikel. Mr. Cohen had a reputation as an intimidator, as attested to by Mr. Zappa, who in 1966 said Mr. Cohen "likes to hit people in the face," according to Zappa biographer Barry Miles. But Mr. Cohen also insisted that the Mothers join the Musicians' Union, which increased their income. He remained Mr. Zappa's manager until an acrimonious split in the mid-1970s.

Other rumors had Mr. Cohen driving around Los Angeles with a crate of hand grenades in the trunk, and running guns for the revolutionary leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. Ms. Ronstadt said she once witnessed him threatening a boisterous bar patron with what he said was a gun. But Mr. Cohen's main weapon was the lawsuit. In 2009, for instance, he sued for defamation over claims made in a biography of Tom Waits that Mr. Cohen stole from Mr. Waits.

"Herbie was a guy who approached everything as if it were a meal, knife and fork at the ready," says Mr. Holzman of Elektra Records.

In addition to the lawsuits with clients, Mr. Cohen was sued in 1993 by the artist/rock groupie Cynthia Plaster Caster for the return of a collection of moldings made from the genitalia of rock stars. The collection had come to Mr. Cohen via Mr. Zappa, who had helped sponsor Ms. Plaster Caster. It languished in a cabinet in his office.

"You'd open the cupboard and see all the casts," recalls Ms. Ronstadt. "I remember being shocked. I mean I was just this girl from Tucson and I had no idea people did things like that."
By STEPHEN MILLER
* REMEMBRANCES
* MARCH 26, 2010

Herb Cohen 1932-2010

Central Figure in Constitutional Free-Speech Case

Irving Feiner, who played a significant role in the Constitutional debate over free speech when the Supreme Court upheld his conviction on charges of disorderly conduct for dangerously provoking a crowd as he spoke from a soapbox in Syracuse in 1949, died on Jan. 23 in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 84. The cause was a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, a ballooning blood vessel in the brain, his daughter Emily said.

Mr. Feiner said years after his conviction that he was “a contentious young man” when, as a Syracuse University student, he mounted the soapbox at South McBride and Harrison Streets around 6:30 p.m. on March 8, 1949, to promote a leftist rally to be held at a hotel in Syracuse. The police said he urged blacks to take up arms against whites. Among other targets, he castigated the Syracuse mayor, the local political system and the American Legion.

(He always denied widespread reports that he called President Harry S. Truman a bum, saying that if he had meant to insult the president, he would have used an earthier phrase.)

The police estimated that 75 to 80 whites and blacks — 25 or 30, according to Mr. Feiner’s side — had gathered and were blocking the sidewalk and becoming restive. People heckled Mr. Feiner, and at least one man threatened him.

Saying he feared a riot, a police officer at least twice asked Mr. Feiner to get down from the box. Mr. Feiner refused and was arrested on the misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, found guilty by a judge and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

The conviction was upheld by two New York State appellate courts, and on Jan. 15, 1951, the United States Supreme Court followed suit by a 6-to-3 vote. Writing for the majority in Feiner v. New York, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson said that he had no objection to the content of Mr. Feiner’s remarks, but that the reaction they engendered justified his arrest and conviction.

A dissenting opinion by Justice Hugo Black said that Mr. Feiner’s arrest resulted from his “deliberate defiance” of an arbitrary command and nothing else.

“I understand that people in totalitarian countries must obey arbitrary orders,” Justice Black wrote. “I had hoped that there was no such duty in the United States.”

The legal principle involved came to be known as the “heckler’s veto,” meaning that a disruptive listener could effectively stop a controversial speaker by threatening havoc. Over time, the Supreme Court’s 1951 decision, which put public peace ahead of freedom of expression, was superseded by nearly opposite judgments in later cases.

“The court abandoned the approach that the expression of mere ideas themselves could be punished as fighting words leading to breaches of the peace,” Jack Levin and Gordana Rabrenovic wrote in the journal American Behavioral Scientist in 2001.

Irving Hyman Feiner was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 23, 1924, to immigrants from Poland who ran a candy store. He grew up in Harlem and the Bronx and dropped out of high school to serve in the Army in Europe in World War II. After the war, he attended Syracuse University on the G.I. Bill.

He was a junior, and active in a leftist organization called the Young Progressives of America, when the group invited O. John Rogge, a former United States assistant attorney general, to speak. Mr. Rogge was part of the defense team for a group of black men accused of killing an elderly white shopkeeper in Trenton.

Called the Trenton Six, they were first sentenced to death by an all-white jury on the basis of confessions that later proved to be false. They became a celebrated cause of the left and civil rights groups. Eventually, four were acquitted, and two were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mr. Rogge and the folk singer Pete Seeger were scheduled to appear in a public school auditorium in Syracuse, but at the last moment Mayor Frank J. Costello revoked the permit. Mr. Feiner and others took to the streets with loudspeakers to promote attendance at the new location, the Hotel Syracuse.

After his arrest, Mr. Feiner was expelled from Syracuse University, and his admission to several law schools was revoked. He went on to success in the printing, movie exhibition and tropical-fish businesses. He ran unsuccessfully for offices that included Rockland County executive, state assemblyman and mayor of Nyack, N.Y., where he lived. He wrote more than one cantankerous letter to newspapers.

Mr. Feiner is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Trudi Kramer; his daughters Susan Feiner and Emily Feiner; and five grandchildren. Another daughter, Rachael, died in 1971.

He returned to Syracuse and finished the work for his undergraduate degree, which he received in 1984. In 2007, the university invited him back to lecture on free speech.

February 3, 2009
Irving Feiner, 84, Central Figure in Constitutional Free-Speech Case, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN