Seattle criminal lawyer John Henry Browne takes an admiring look at his life and work — with a disappointing lack of introspection or depth.
‘The Devil’s Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre’
By John Henry Browne
Chicago Review Press, 248 pp., $26.99
In his just-published autobiography “The Devil’s Defender,” John Henry Browne, one of Seattle’s most flamboyant criminal defense lawyers, takes a look back at his life and career. He finds much to admire.
While certainly an easy read, with a fluid and conversational tone, the book is an opportunity missed, and badly. Browne has worked on some very interesting cases that raise difficult questions, and there’s certainly a book in there somewhere. But this brief survey of his professional life betrays a disappointing lack of introspection or depth.
As a young lawyer in the King County Public Defender’s office, Browne was assigned to represent serial killer Ted Bundy, who confessed to 30 homicides of young women over several years. Bundy was ultimately convicted of murder and executed in Florida in 1989. Browne developed a close relationship with Bundy that spanned years of calls and correspondence.
Browne also represented Benjamin Ng, one of three perpetrators of the Seattle Wah Mee Massacre in which 14 individuals were shot at close range. Defending him at trial was no small task, but Browne was able to save him from the death penalty. Another of the killers, Willie Mak, by contrast, was sentenced to death (later reduced to life without parole).
Browne’s more recent cases include defending Sgt. Robert Bales, who killed 16 villagers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Colton Harris-Moore, the so-called “Barefoot Bandit” who taught himself to fly an airplane and then stole several of them during the course of a small-bore crime spree. Browne negotiated a complicated plea bargain for Harris-Moore.
These cases could have provided a springboard to discussing the role of criminal defense counsel in our system of justice, or how one might reconcile one’s professional obligations with horrific blood-splattered crime scenes and obviously guilty clients. Browne comments in passing that he rises to defend those charged with such crimes not because they are virtuous but “because I believe that killing is wrong, whether it’s committed by an individual or sponsored by the state.” But that’s about as deep as his analysis gets.
Indeed, Browne’s conversations and correspondence with Bundy (some of it reprinted in an appendix) or his work representing Ng or Bales could have filled an entire volume. Instead, Browne barely scratches the surface of his work, focusing instead on apparent efforts to burnish his own reputation.
He comments that when he was asked to represent Bales, “[a]s usual, I knew it would probably break me financially. Sure it would mean international attention for my law firm and myself, but I was at the stage of my career where building my résumé or getting national media attention meant little.” Passing comments like this abound. He quotes a speech in which he contended that the ethics rules that apply to all licensed lawyers are “advisory” rather than “mandatory,” a rather distinctly minority view. He even includes “John Henry Browne’s Ten Rules for Trials” in another appendix. It’s all a bit much.
The editors of this short (fewer than 250 pages) work would have done well to tone down the bluster and to send Browne a Starbucks gift card with instructions to finish the book.
Year: 2016
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In ‘The Devil’s Defender,’ Barefoot Bandit attorney looks back on his career
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‘Good Vibrations’: Beach Boy Mike Love unloads in a contentious memoir
In his new book, “Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy,” Mike Love uses the memoir form to attempt to settle some scores.
‘Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy’
by Mike Love
Blue Rider Press, 436 pp., $28
It’s difficult to imagine a more iconic American rock band than the Beach Boys. Bursting on the scene in the early 1960s with catchy songs about the California surfing scene, the Beach Boys had a string of hits that continue to inspire generations of fans. “Surfin’ USA,” “Catch a Wave,” “California Girls,” “God Only Knows,” and dozens of other hits propelled the group to prominence.
The band included Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson — all brothers — and their cousin, Mike Love. Under Brian’s direction, the group constructed tightly woven harmonies that spoke of life on the beach. Love was the lead singer and contributed lyrics to many of the band’s songs.
In his just-released autobiography, Love sets out to settle more than a few scores. Perhaps it’s a hazard of the genre, but the entire effort is more than a little self-serving. Love is alternately defensive, angry, self-pitying and proud. It’s dizzying just trying to keep his grudges straight.
Love has had a contentious relationship with his cousins — and many of his fans — over the years. Brian Wilson was the genius of the band, responsible for writing the stunning music, the catchy melodies and — most important — the astonishing harmonies.
Brian, though, stopped touring in 1965 (but he’s coming to Seattle soon!), instead focusing his time on creating ever more complicated songs. “Pet Sounds,” released in 1966, was largely written by Brian Wilson, with vocal overdubs recorded by the rest of the band when they returned from an overseas tour. The album is now considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time and an inspiration for the Beatles masterpiece, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The band, under Love’s direction, continued to tour without Brian. As Brian’s music became increasingly esoteric, he began to crumble under the combined weight of public expectation, increasing drug use and evident mental instability. His planned masterpiece album, “Smile” was abandoned as Brian unraveled.
Love, meanwhile, continued to drive the band forward. But as the 1960s progressed, the Beach Boys — with their matching striped shirts — fell out of fashion and, without Brian’s contributions, the band suffered. Since then it has released several mediocre records but has largely survived as an oldies band.
Love bitterly complains that he did not receive credit for co-authoring various hits, “California Girls” among them. He sued Brian Wilson over the issue (and separately for defamation) and won a judgment declaring him the co-author of dozens of the band’s songs.
According to Rolling Stone magazine, Love “is considered one of the biggest assholes in the history of rock & roll.” Reviled for his hostility to “Pet Sounds” (he denies it), his tight gold lamé pants, his Republican sympathies (he denies it) and his vain effort to conceal his balding head in a rotating series of caps, Love is easily one of the most controversial figures in rock ’n’ roll.
Dennis Wilson died in 1983, in a diving accident. Carl Wilson died in 1998 of lung cancer. Brian Wilson rarely performs.
Love, for his part, continues to lead a band legally licensed to call itself the “Beach Boys,” singing songs he helped write 55 years earlier. And carrying just a few grudges. -
‘American Heiress’: the long, strange trip of Patty Hearst
In “American Heiress,” Jeffrey Toobin revives the story of Patty Hearst for a new audience, using previously unreleased material to chronicle her odyssey from sheltered rich girl to kidnap victim to gun-wielding bank robber. Toobin appears Sept. 17 at the Seattle Public Library.
‘American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst’
by Jeffrey Tobin
Doubleday, 368 pp., $28.95
On Feb. 4, 1974, Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a leftist radical group calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst, a college junior, was an heiress to the Hearst family fortune, and her kidnapping splashed across the front pages of America’s newspapers. The sensational story exploded when Hearst tape-recorded a message, vowing allegiance to the group and announcing her new nom-de-guerre, “Tania.”
Her parents desperately tried everything to secure her release, even agreeing to feed all of the poor people in Oakland and San Francisco, Calif., for free as a show of “good faith.” Hearst responded by prominently wielding a machine gun during a robbery of the Hibernia Bank, near San Francisco.
With access to previously unreleased material, Jeffrey Toobin recounts Hearst’s journey down the rabbit hole from kidnapping victim to self-righteous revolutionary and back again. Toobin, a staff writer at the New Yorker and a legal analyst for CNN, is well matched to the story, with a keen eye for detail and a powerful narrative style.
And what a story. The SLA was hardly an “army.” Led by Donald DeFreeze, members of the pathetic group styled themselves as “revolutionaries” but in truth constituted a handful of naive misfits hoping to inspire revolution by issuing baroque “communiqués” thickly layered in impenetrable Marxist jargon. It was, to put it mildly, ineffective.
But they certainly were well-armed. Equipped with machine guns and pistols, the “army” scurried from one dismal hideout to another.
The FBI launched a nationwide dragnet to locate Hearst but for the better part of a year turned up nothing but embarrassing failure. The FBI ultimately traced the self-styled revolutionaries to their depressing suburban hideout in Los Angeles. Hearst, with Bill and Emily Harris, was away when the police formed a cordon around the house, and the standoff erupted into the largest police shootout in American history. The police lobbed more than 5,300 rounds of ammunition and 83 canisters of tear gas. The SLA comrades returned fire with more than 2,000 rounds before the house caught fire, and all of them were either shot or burned alive.
Hearst, Bill and Emily Harris, now joined by several others, targeted Crocker National Bank near Sacramento for their next “withdrawal.” But Myrna Opsahl, a 42-year old mother of four, was in the bank and, when she didn’t drop to the floor fast enough, Emily Harris shot and killed her with a shotgun.
The FBI eventually tracked down Hearst and the others. Her family hired F. Lee Bailey, then one of the most arrogant and self-indulgent celebrity lawyers in the country, to represent her. Hearst soon began cooperating with the FBI, completing her transition from “revolutionary” to victim.
Bailey, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a disaster. Hearst was convicted and sentenced to serve seven years. Her family posted bail and launched a rehabilitating PR campaign. On Jan. 29, 1979, President Carter commuted her sentence without comment. She had served less than a year in prison. Twenty-two years later, on his final day in office, President Clinton issued a full pardon. Neither mentioned the death of Opsahl during the Crocker National Bank robbery.
Toobin’s book is a fascinating ride through a troubled time, as the more innocent ’60s faded to memory and were replaced by something far darker. “American Heiress” is a terrific study of a malleable young woman who either bravely survived a horrific ordeal, or cravenly joined delusional self-appointed “revolutionaries,” killing an innocent mother along the way, and got away with it. Or perhaps both. -
Nathaniel Philbrick’s ‘Valiant Ambition’: How betrayal helped win the Revolutionary War
Nathaniel Philbrick’s gripping new work, “Valiant Ambition,” tells how, after years of bickering by Congress and the states, the Revolutionary cause was finally galvanized and united by Benedict Arnold’s betrayal. Philbrick appears Monday, May 23, at Town Hall Seattle.
‘Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution’
by Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking, 443 pp., $30
The story of America’s founding is well known: Defiant citizen-soldiers threw a “tea party” in Boston, formed a well-timed coalition with the French, and defeated the mightiest army on Earth. It’s a great story, but the truth is, that’s not how it actually happened.
In fact, the Revolutionary War dragged on for eight years. George Washington’s “army” was barely supported by a bickering Congress and by deeply divided states uninterested in building a unified national government. The continental army nearly froze and starved to death at Valley Forge, for lack of meaningful support from Congress.
Nathaniel Philbrick, who won the National Book Award for “In the Heart of the Sea”, tells the fascinating story of Washington’s struggle, the fractious young Republic and Benedict Arnold’s surprisingly central role in it all. This is history at its most compelling: political machinations, military jostling and outright treachery. And Philbrick’s vivid writing brings the whistling cannon balls and half-frozen soldiers to life (and death) in vivid detail. He will discuss his book at Town Hall Seattle on Monday May 23, 2016.
One of Washington’s strongest generals, Benedict Arnold, played a decisive role in several key battles. He succeeded in delaying the British naval advance down Lake Champlain that could have lost the war for the Americans. The British recognized and rued his brilliance. Congress didn’t and promoted others past him, a stinging rebuke.
Arnold, desperate for cash, ultimately convinced himself that it was in the colonies’ best interests to end the war and reached out to the British to negotiate. In exchange for a substantial payment, Arnold would reveal the plans for the fortress at West Point (which he then commanded) to assist a British invasion.
He nearly succeeded. Arnold delivered the plans, but the plot was foiled when Major John André, the British spy chief working with Arnold, was stopped on his way back to British-controlled Manhattan by a band of New York militiamen who found the plans and frog-marched him back to the American forces.
Washington had Andre promptly hanged. Arnold, for his part, barely escaped.
Arnold’s treachery galvanized the American revolutionaries, forcing them to recognize that the long-slumbering war could, in fact, be lost and quickly. Self interest was put aside, the war effort funded and victory was ultimately achieved. Washington’s steady leadership obviously deserves unalloyed credit for that victory. But it was Arnold and his infamous betrayal that finally gave the Americans what they needed: a homegrown enemy to save them from themselves.
Perhaps the most honest account of the dysfunctional dynamics of the revolution and its fledgling government was penned by Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789. He planned to publish it in his retirement but, as the mythology of the heroic American Revolution took hold, he destroyed the monumental memoir instead. “Let the world admire the supposed wisdom and valor of our great men. Perhaps they may adopt the qualities that have been ascribed to them and thus good may be done. I shall not undeceive future generations.”
Philbrick takes on that very task of “undeceiving” and peels back the mythology to reveal a teetering war effort, a bickering Congress, discordant states unwilling to coalesce to support the new national government and — above all — a traitor who sought to sell out his own country for personal gain and achieved instead the one thing that no other revolutionary could: a unification of the Americans and an end to the war. And for that, we have much to thank Benedict Arnold. -
A character study of Thomas Jefferson as ‘patriarch’
In “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs,” historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf create a character study of Thomas Jefferson, attempting to explain our third president through his perceived role as patriarch to both his families and to his slaves.
‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination’
by Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf
Liveright, 320 pp., $27.95
It’s not entirely clear that the world actually needs another biography of Thomas Jefferson. True, he played a remarkable role in shaping the young American democracy at a time when it was not at all clear that the rebellious colonies would emerge as a cohesive nation.
He wrote the Declaration of Independence, served as the nation’s third president, second secretary of state and as ambassador to France. But the library of Jefferson biographies is seemingly boundless and includes contributions such as Dumas Malone’s six-volume series (“Jefferson and His Time”), a work that took more than 30 years to complete and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for the first five volumes. What’s more to add?
But perhaps the sheer volume of scholarship is a testament to Jefferson’s enduring contributions and his elusive and contradictory personal life. Jefferson was a master of soaring rhetoric, articulating lofty principles of universal justice and equality while simultaneously not only owning large numbers of African-American slaves, but sleeping with one of them — Sally Hemings — and fathering several children by her. The relationship, long rumored and the subject of fierce debate, is no longer subject to serious question in the wake of definitive DNA testing.
Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf take on the task of explaining Jefferson’s own vision of himself and how he reconciled these conflicting threads in their somewhat awkwardly titled new book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.” Gordon-Reed, a professor at Harvard Law School, is the author of the “The Hemingses of Monticello,” for which she won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Onuf, one of the nation’s leading Jefferson scholars, teaches at the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson himself. No insignificant pool of talent here.
The book is largely a character study, organized in sections seeking to explain Jefferson’s understanding of himself and his life through his roles as a “patriarch” or as a “traveller,” both at home and abroad.
It’s an approach that allows exploration of Jefferson, unleashed from a chronological narrative. But perhaps more interesting, the book returns, like a touchstone, to remind the reader that Monticello and all that it stood for was built on the backs of enslaved African-Americans. Jefferson may have preferred to turn his face and avoid the harsh reality of his slaveholding, but neither these authors, nor history, will allow that contradiction to stand unexamined.
Of course, Jefferson’s fraught relationship with Sally Hemings is central to understanding Jefferson. Hemings was just 16 when she accompanied Jefferson’s young daughter from Philadelphia to Paris, where he served as the American representative to France.
Jefferson fathered several children with Hemings and, as Gordon-Reed and Onuf note, he held great affection for both his acknowledged as well as his unacknowledged family. He agreed with Hemings to free their children when they reached adulthood, a deal he honored (even as he simultaneously refused to free the slaves who kept Monticello afloat economically).
In the end, the book is an important contribution to understanding Jefferson in light of his now-confirmed relationship with Hemings. Sex, as they say, changes everything. Even our understanding of Jefferson himself. -
‘While the City Slept’: must-read accounting of a terrible crime
Seattle writer Eli Sanders’ “While the City Slept” indicts a mental-health system that failed to prevent two Seattle women from assault, rape and murder by a disturbed young man.
“While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent into Madness”
by Eli Sanders
Viking, 316 pp., $28
On July 18, 2009, an unusually warm summer evening, 23-year-old Isaiah Kalebu climbed through the open window of a small house in South Park, a working-class neighborhood in south Seattle. Over the course of the next two hours, he brutally attacked the two women who lived there — Jennifer Hopper and her fiancée Teresa Butz — raping them both and eventually murdering Teresa. Kalebu escaped but was captured within days at Magnuson Park.
In “While the City Slept”, Eli Sanders tells the story of how these three individual lives came to fatefully intersect that evening. Sanders, who writes for Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the murder. Drawing on court records and exhaustive interviews, Sanders compiles an arresting narrative, first of the two victims, then of Kalebu himself. It’s heartbreaking all the way around.
Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz came from different backgrounds. Teresa grew up proud, tough and stubborn in a large St. Louis family. Jennifer was born in the mountains near Santa Fe. They fell in love, moved in together and planned a wedding (technically, a commitment ceremony since same-sex marriage was not yet legal in Washington) for Sept. 12, 2009. Teresa even bought a wedding dress.
Isaiah Kalebu was a troubled young man. He was raised in a household with a distant authoritarian father who had fled a civil war in Uganda and favored corporal punishment with “broomsticks, belts and sticks.” Kalebu started off as an intelligent child who loved to read but slowly began to dissolve into mental illness.
As he grew from a troubled child to smoldering young adult, he appeared in court on numerous occasions. Each appearance was an opportunity for mental-health counseling that could have addressed his mental-health issues. Overworked Superior Court judges with only a partial record before them and grossly underfunded mental- health resources, however, combined to ensure that Kalebu never received the counseling that might have diverted him from the path before him, the path that led to Teresa and Jennifer’s open window and all that followed.
Sanders’ research is meticulous and his writing demonstrates the strength that won him the Pulitzer. He uses vivid imagery to bring the story to life: The polluted Duwamish River snaking through South Park, the neighborhood’s decaying bridge to downtown, and the slumbering mountains in the distance.
As Sanders comments, “Some stories are worth assembling. Some crimes cry out for an accounting. Some offenses indict so much, and reflect so much, that they demand attention — to what was taken, to the taker, to the trials that preceded and followed.” This is certainly a story worth telling with lessons well worth learning.
Unfortunately, the effort is marred by two flaws. First, in recounting Teresa and Jennifer’s life and romance Sanders awkwardly reverts to the present tense, presumably in an effort to infuse immediacy in the telling. The device is more distracting than useful. Second, Sanders devotes the final pages of the book to an extended denunciation of inadequate funding for mental health services. He’s right beyond a doubt, but the discussion seems oddly out of place here, like an opinion column mistakenly tacked onto the end of the book. And it’s unnecessary in any event. Sanders’ superb account of Kalebu’s voyage through the criminal justice system, and its devastating denouement, speaks far more powerfully to our shameful failure to fully fund mental-health resources.