They Hate Him: What’s 60% of Thirty Talents?*

In his memoir, James Ray explained why he fired Arthur Hanes and son as his attorneys.  Ray insisted that he had to give his version of events on the stand; how he was duped by a mysterious figure he knew only as Raoul to purchase the gun used in the slaying of Rev. Dr. Martin King.  More to the point, Ray felt that he needed a jury to hear that he, unlike the rest of his family, had no antipathies toward African Americans in general, and against Dr. King specifically. 

Hanes remained adamant that Ray should not say anything during the trial, and refused to put him on the stand.  That refusal, led to his dismissal by Ray.  

Attorneys almost always have a really good reason for not putting a defendant on the stand, whether they are guilty or innocent.  If guilty, the defendant might commit perjury under cross-examination.  This would not only wreck his/her own credibility in front of a jury should a prosecutor introduce rebuttal evidence, but also incur additional  felony charges for lying under oath. If innocent, a skilled cross-examiner could provoke an emotional outburst – which juries apparently don’t like – or slant the questions to make it seem as though the defendant is inconsistent, and thus lying, and therefore guilty.  There’s also the added irony that innocent defendants can very well look guilty on the stand precisely because they are innocent.  As Atlanta criminal defense attorney Jack Martin explains:

The innocent person doesn’t know what happened, so sometimes it’ll look like they’re hiding something. The guilty person knows exactly what happened and can contrive an explanation.

Yet some attorneys say that there comes a rare time when a defendant has to risk taking the stand.  As Pennsylvania criminal defense lawyer Gary Asteak told NPR’s Neal Conan during the latter’s press coverage of the Jerry Sandusky trial:

“[Conan}:  And jurors are always instructed, after they start - before they start deliberations that the fact that the defendant didn't testify should make no - draw no conclusions from that. But there's that, and then there's human nature.

[Asteak] Well, you're right. The law is belied by human nature. Having sat to the trial, the jurors had an opportunity to sit and determine the credibility of all of the witnesses against Sandusky. Sandusky's been sitting there at counsel table. They've had an opportunity to observe him, watch his physical demeanor. But human nature says, if you're innocent, you should protest your innocence. If you didn't do it, you should look me in the eye and say: I didn't do it.”

What Asteak asserts here is that there are emotionally fraught issues within some cases that compel the public (as represented by a jury) to demand, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”  And it’s in those times where a lawyer might consult with the client to determine whether or not testifying is a good idea.  For Ray, the outrage over Martin’s murder played out in nationwide-riots.  If innocent, it would be in his interest to say it ain’t so.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that the defendant has the right to testify, regardless of her attorney’s wishes.  As The Berry Law Firm (Nebraska) posted on its website:

The decision whether to testify at trial belongs solely to the client. While the lawyer can decide tactics and strategy, the lawyer does not get to decide if the defendant testifies. However, the lawyer will advise the defendant as to whether he believes the defendant should testify. The defendant may then follow that advice or reject it.

One could guess that Hanes never believed Ray’s story, or for that matter his own wacky hypothesis involving Chineese spies and black militants.  If so, then Hanes might have feared a subornation charge.  But Ray, researcher Harold Weisberg and others noted that the Hanes attorneys had other motivations for keeping him off the stand. 

Less than a week before the trial was to begin, [author W. Bradford] Huie heard that I had been insisting on taking the stand.  He summoned Jerry from St. Louis to Huie headquarters in Hartselle, Alabama, and explained the finances of the case.  Since he and his publishers were underwriting my defense, Huie said, Hanes had to dance to their tune.  I wasn’t going to be permitted to testify in my own defense because that would put my side of the story into the public domain, destroying Huie’s exclusive hold on it.

Ray immediately hired an even higher-powered attorney from Texas:  Houston-based Percy Foreman.  Foreman had convinced Ray and his family that the contract with Bradford Huie worked against him, saying, “The only thing that Hanes and Huie are interested in is how much money they can exploit from this case.”  Moreover, he also convinced Ray that he believed his story.

The first thing Foreman did was to ask Judge Preston Battle for a continuance, seeing that he was new to the case and had little time to scrutinize the 5,000+ pages of documents held in evidence by the prosecution, or investigate the crime completely.  Judge battled granted the continuance, delaying the trial’s start from its November 1968 date to 3 March 1968. 

Foreman then filed a “pauper’s oath,” stating in effect that Ray did not have any funds that he could pay toward his $150,000 fee.  Furthermore, he would be pitting his meager resources against the estimated $1.4 million the FBI had already spent on the investigation.  Battle, again, helped Foreman out by ordering the state’s Public Defender’s office to “assign as many persons as necessary” to help Foreman.  On the spot, Battle assigned PD Hugh Stanton Sr., who happened to be in the court at that time.

Foreman wasn’t exactly telling the truth when claiming that he had received no payments from Ray. James had endorsed to him a $5,000 check from Huie

Foreman’s actions between November and March would seem puzzling for an attorney trying to acquit a client.  He missed court dates, during which Stanton, and his son Hugh Jr., would represent Ray.  What’s worse, he seemed to have made little headway into the case, or for that matter expended much effort.  Instead, he had been giving numerous interviews to the media, attending to other clients in Houston, and seemingly working on every case except Ray’s.

Starting about a month before the trial’s scheduled opening, Foreman aggressively pressured Ray to change his plea to guilty.  Percy mentioned that he had met with Deputy DA Philip Canale and Judge Battle, intimating that the two agreed that if James would change his plea he would not receive the death penalty.

Ray gave a decisive “No” to the offer.  Nevertheless, Foreman persisted, spending, by his own account, between forty to fifty hours convincing James to change his plea.  For one thing, Foreman touted the seemingly mountainous evidence the FBI gathered against him.  He also warned that pressure politics would lead to the impaneling of an all-African American jury, who was sure to hate him and find him guilty.  What’s worse, Foreman implied that the FBI could possibly indict and convict his brothers were he not man enough to take the entire blame for the assassination. . 

Eventually, as the trial date loomed closer, Ray gave in due to what he termed “midnight sunstroke”:

Every window had been sealed over with a thick metal plate.  For fresh air, a blower blasted me with warm, then cold gusts.  For light, I saw no sun–the whole block was flooded with the bright, atrificial glare of bulbs that burned 24 hours a day.  I soon lost track of time, and all sense of day and night....

A couple of months passed.  I slept in fits and starts, never getting a genuine rest.  I began to have nosebleeds, which I blamed on the total lack of natural light, fresh air and privacy.

In other words, Ray had more than Foreman to wear him down.  He made the rather plausible claim that sleep deprivation and isolation clouded his judgment.  He finally agreed to take a plea deal close to the trial’s commencement, without understanding that by taking the plea he would actually be admitting to taking a gun to the bathroom of Bessie Brewer’s boarding house, aiming at Dr. King, and firing the fatal shot that mortally fell the Nobel laureate. 

For his part, Ray maintained before and after the trial that he had unwittingly been a part of King’s assassination, and that he was guilty of the lesser crime of felony murder.  He tried to assert the same story during the court proceedings, but Foreman immediately shut him up.  Only when the gavel came down did it dawn on him that he had just taken the entire rap. 

Curiously, Judge Battle, two weeks later, would express mild shock at the guilty plea, and the ardor with which Foreman pursued it.  When asked by AP reporter Bernard Gavzer why he accepted the plea deal, Battle replied:

It was entirely in my power to do so.  But my conscience told me that it better served the ends of justice to accept the agreement.  Had there been a trial, there could always have been the possibility , in such an emotionally charged case, of a hung jury.  Or, though it may appear far-fetched now, he could have perhaps been acquitted by a jury.

All the above leaves us with the impression that Foreman did everything he could to assert himself into the case.  Perhaps he believed in Ray’s guilt.  Perhaps he didn’t.  It seems more likely that it didn’t matter to him one way or another.  He had the state of Tennessee pick up the tab for the Stantons, who actually represented Ray for the bulk of his time in court.  Instead of investigating, he grandstanded and attended to other business.  He made himself scarce to Ray, except toward the end when he devoted all of his efforts to cop a guilty plea.

That prompts the question of why Foreman would steal a client from under the nose of another attorney, only to sell him down the river.

Weisberg gives us a possible answer, one affirmed by Ray and expounded upon by his future attorney, Dr. William Pepper.  Foreman, according to them, acted as he did for the same reason Ray fired Hanes and son earlier.

It would appear that both Foreman and Hanes, two very expensive lawyers with a dirt-poor client, stood to gain financially as did the source of their prospective wealth, one W. Bradford Huie.  Through Huie they expected a share of subsequent rights for television shows, movies, books and other media.  As Weisberg noted:

Ray had one thing to sell, his story.

Now, unless Ray’s story was sold before the trial, what came out in the trial was not worth anything to Foreman et al.  At that moment it became what the law calls ‘public domain.’  It is anybody’s and everybody’s.  No one need pay anyone anything for it and, more, it is ‘privileged,’ as is any court proceeding.  Every experienced writer knows this, as Huie certainly does, and the least competent attorney, which Foreman is not, also know it.

I short, unless Ray was capitalized before trial, they had nothing to capitalize! [italics original]

And how much did they stand to “capitalize”?  According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 60% of all media sales:

Foreman said he originally was to get 60% of a contract for picture, book and magazine rights.  The 60% will probably be more than $400,000 he said....

Picture rights have already been sold for $175,000 plus 13% of the receipts, he said.**

Pepper would later add to this his suspicion that Huie was working as a government informant, most likely for the FBI.  Ray had noticed that almost all the people he named as potential interview subjects were not interviewed by him, but rather Special Agents.  This led them to believe that Huie was freely passing information to the Bureau.

Despite the fact that Ray never allocuted, the jury nevertheless found him guilty and sentenced him to ninety-nine years in prison. 

Ray, sensing that his counsel had betrayed him, wrote Judge Battle asking for his advice on how to appeal the verdict. 

I don’t know why Ray did it.   Or what good that would do, asking a judge to find reversible error in his own decision.  We know, however, that Ray wrote the letter, and that Battle, at the very least opened the envelope.

It’s not clear if the jurist read it. On Tuesday, 6 May 1969, authorities found Ray’s letter under Battle’s corpse.  Apparently, the jurist died of a massive coronary only moments after handling the missive.   

_______________
*I know.  It’s eighteen talents. 

**It was common scuttlebutt that noted Italian director Carlo Ponti shelled out the $175,000 plus 13% mentioned here, although I have not seen corroboration of that from another source.