F. Lee Bailey
He later served as the attorney in a number of other high-profile cases, such as Albert DeSalvo, a suspect in the "Boston Strangler" murders, heiress Patty Hearst's trial for bank robberies committed during her involvement with the Symbionese Liberation Army, and U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina for the My Lai Massacre.
[3] For most of his career, Bailey was licensed in Florida and in Massachusetts, where he was respectively disbarred in 2001 and 2003 for misconduct while defending Claude Louis DuBoc, who had been accused of trafficking marijuana.
His mother, Grace (Mitchell), was a teacher and nursery school director, and his father, Francis Lee Bailey Sr., was an advertising salesman.
[11] He briefly returned to Harvard before being admitted to Boston University School of Law in 1957, which accepted his military experience in lieu of the requirement for students to have completed at least three years of undergraduate college courses.
[13][14] In 1954, Sam Sheppard was found guilty in the murder of his wife Marilyn in a case that was one of the inspirations for the television series The Fugitive (1963–1967).
In 1966, Bailey successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Sheppard had been denied due process, winning a re-trial.
The prosecution claimed that Coppolino injected his victims with a paralyzing drug called succinylcholine chloride,[19] which at the time was undetectable due to limited forensic technology.
[7] He was later convicted of a series of other crimes, including the murder of General Motors representative Frank Smith in 1974 and a rape which took place in 1975.
[22][23] Bailey successfully defended U.S. Army Captain Ernest Medina in his 1971 court-martial for responsibility in the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.
[25] Medina additionally denied personally killing any Vietnamese non-combatants at My Lai, with the exception of a young woman whom two soldiers testified that they had found hiding in a ditch.
[27][28] The prosecution of Patty Hearst, a newspaper heiress who had committed armed bank robberies after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), was one of Bailey's defeats.
[33] The Symbionese Liberation Army members participating in the robbery were therefore subject to the death penalty under the felony murder rule.
[34] Bailey negotiated with prosecutors for Hearst to receive use immunity in exchange for her testimony about the Carmichael robbery, thus protecting her from a possible death sentence.
Bailey was acquitted but may have faced legal defense bills of $100,000 along with a $50 fine for the lesser infraction of running a stop sign.
After 44 days at the Federal Correctional Institution, Tallahassee, Bailey's brother succeeded in raising the money to enable him to return the stock, and he was freed.
[40] British citizen Chantal McCorkle, along with her American husband William, were tried and convicted in 1998 in Florida for her part in a financial fraud.
The McCorkles sold kits, advertised in infomercials, purporting to show buyers how to get rich by buying property in foreclosures and government auctions.
Among the grounds for their conviction was their representation in the infomercials that they owned luxury automobiles and airplanes (actually rented for the commercials), and their use of purported testimonials from satisfied customers, who were actually paid actors.
[42] A strike to Bailey's credibility came when he took on the case of aggrieved families of passengers on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1983.
He aggravated other clients by traveling to Libya to discuss defending two men who were charged with blowing up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, even after undertaking the cause of the relatives of that bombing's victims.
To the latter, the expedition to Tripoli was a clear conflict of interest; Bailey denied that he intended to defend the Libyans, though a letter he had written to the U.S. Government suggested otherwise.
The Florida disbarment was the result of his handling of shares in a pharmaceutical company named Biochem Pharma[54] during his representation of marijuana trafficker Claude DuBoc.
[63] In early 2003, a judge ordered Bailey to pay $5 million in taxes and penalties on income connected with the Duboc case.
The majority said Bailey had not proved by "clear and convincing evidence that he possesses the requisite honesty and integrity" to practice law.
In March 2013, a two-day hearing was held by Supreme Judicial Court Justice Donald G. Alexander in which Bailey's suitability to practice law was examined.
Justice Alexander filed a 57-page ruling on April 19, 2013, stating that Bailey "was almost fit to practice law, except for an outstanding tax debt of nearly $2 million".
[69] Bailey was allowed to move for reconsideration of the decision "if [he] offer[ed] a plan to repay the nearly $2 million he owes in back taxes to the federal government".
[78][77] After a period of ill health, he died of an unspecified cause in a hospice center in Atlanta on June 3, 2021, just one week prior to his 88th birthday.
: Made in America, Bailey is featured heavily through interviews and archive footage of the Simpson murder trial, particularly his cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman.
[83] In his interview, Bailey continued to assert that Fuhrman deliberately planted the incriminating glove on Simpson's estate in an attempt to frame him.
