In his decades-long career, he was celebrated in some corners and scorned in others.
F. Lee Bailey, one of the nation’s most storied criminal trial lawyers and a tenacious defender of O.J. Simpson, Patty Hearst and a host of other famous and infamous clients in a tumultuous career punctuated by his own collisions with the law and his eventual disbarment, died June 3 at a hospice center in the Atlanta area. He was 87. His son Bendrix Bailey confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause. Mr. Bailey was celebrated in some corners and scorned in others as he represented a broad swath of deeply unpopular suspects ranging from mutilation murderers and international drug lords to get-rich-quick-scheme artists. In the courtroom, he fascinated the public with his cool, pointed oratory and prodigious memory as well as his relentlessness. even appearing in a Smirnoff vodka ad — and in his give-no-quarter advocacy for his clients, he rarely acknowledged defeat. Steven Brill, founder of Court TV and American Lawyer magazine, once called him “an enduring legal figure in the sense that he’s been willing, and in fact relished, taking on clients that were the demons of society.” A former private investigator, Mr. Bailey was regarded as a master of pretrial preparation — meeting with key witnesses, collecting pictures and documents and visiting locations relevant to the crime. The purpose, he said, was to “stuff my head with enough facts for when the action starts.” Mr. Bailey could question witnesses for hours without notes and was likened by colleagues to such superstar 20th-century courtroom advocates as Clarence Darrow, Edward Bennett Williams and Percy Foreman, who defended James Earl Ray following the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The jury was not the only audience Mr. Bailey played to. He championed his clients in an almost constant barrage of commentary to reporters and appearances on “The Tonight Show,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and other television talk programs. “Massachusetts just burned another witch,” he growled to reporters after a jury in 1967 rejected an insanity plea on behalf of sexual assault defendant Albert DeSalvo. DeSalvo separately had confessed to Mr. Bailey to being the widely feared “Boston Strangler” sought in the killing of 13 women in the early 1960s. Mr. Bailey adroitly excluded the confession from court, then unsuccessfully challenged what he contended was the state’s antiquated definition of criminal insanity in DeSalvo’s unrelated sexual assault case. DeSalvo was sentenced to a 10-years-plus-life term. Police, lacking any clues beyond the confession, never charged him in the Boston Strangler case. DeSalvo was slain in prison in 1973 by another inmate. For all his courtroom wizardry, Mr. Bailey spent much of his life consumed with personal legal troubles. He was jailed, found in contempt of court and criminally charged in a range of legal entanglements. His verbal antics got him barred from practice for one year in New Jersey after he suggested that prosecutors bribed witnesses in a murder case. In 1970, a Massachusetts judge censured him for “his philosophy of extreme egocentricity.” He was acquitted of a drunken-driving charge in San Francisco in 1982. The lengthy trial, involving seven police witnesses, provoked Mr. Bailey to write “How to Protect Yourself Against Cops in California and Other Strange Places,” a 90-page handbook on guarding against police abuses. In 1973, he was indicted in Florida on investor fraud charges along with his client, cosmetics super-salesman Glenn Turner. Mr. Bailey was accused of making speeches that endorsed investments in Turner’s franchises. The trial ended in a hung jury. The case, however, had pushed Mr. Bailey to the financial brink, and his business fell sharply. It took him a few years to rebound. In 1996, he was jailed for 43 days for contempt of court stemming from accusations that he misused as legal fees millions of dollars in stock owned by convicted international drug trafficker Claude Duboc.
