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ORAL HISTORY OF JUDGE RICARDO URBINA
THIRD INTERVIEW
11 APRIL 2011
This is the third interview of the Oral History of U.S. District Judge Ricardo
Urbina as part of the Oral History Project of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is
Gene Granof. The interview took place in the chambers of Judge Urbina at the United States
Courthouse in the District of Columbia on Monday, April 11, 2011 at 12:30 p.m..
Mr. Granof: Last time we talked, I think we got you just about to your first year of law school
where, as I recall, you were juggling more than any first-year law student could be
expected to do. You had just gotten married, you were competing on a national
level in track, and of course enduring all the problems and difficulties of starting
first-year law school. So, how did you manage to get through the first year of law
school, particularly competing in track, which takes up a lot of time?
Judge Urbina: I think that the main ingredient to being able to get through that first year was
ignorance. If I had really thought it through, I would have clearly seen that it was
far too much to expect of myself, but in addition to those things that you mention,
I was also working 20 to 25 hours a week. What happened was, I was able to
organize my time well, and even with good time and organizational skills, I still
found that I was deficient in each one of those categories. I wasn’t home enough,
I wasn’t training enough, I was on the job, and that went okay because it wasn’t
terribly demanding. I was a clerk messenger at Hogan & Hartson. And then there
were my studies. Now, at one point I got so burnt out that I decided that maybe I
should just drop out of law school. There was this one professor who took a
particular interest in me. He noticed that I had kind of stopped going to classes,
so he sent a message through one of the other students that he wanted to see me. I
went to see him. We had a long talk, and he was an extraordinarily positive
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influence on me in that he bolstered my self-confidence, and he urged me to be
more realistic in terms of what I was doing and how I was doing it. His advice
took hold actually the second year because at the end of that first year I went out
to California and I ran the Olympic trials. They took three people, I was fourth.
Mr. Granof: That must have been a disappointment to come that close?
Judge Urbina: Yes, it was a disappointment, but everything happens for a reason. My wife and
I, we had some difficulties, but we were able to work them out. I decided to
continue working but to cut back on my hours and to spend on other priorities all
the time and energy I would have dedicated to running. I stopped running
altogether. So that gave me kind of a margin of time and energy that had been
misspent, so to speak. So all of that together gave me some kind of new energy,
some revitalization, for the second year. But, basically, for the first year that’s
how it worked, and that’s how I managed.
Mr. Granof: Who was the professor?
Judge Urbina: His name was Richard Gordon. He was a Georgetown undergrad alumnus; he
was a Georgetown Law graduate; he had been a National Debating champion in
undergrad; and he had been a Moot Court champion in law school. I learned
about these things much later. For all I knew, he was just another kind of paperchase
type law professor. Apparently he took an interest in me. He noticed, and
whatever it is he saw he thought was worth cultivating. So he made a difference.
His words, coupled with the experience that I had, a very positive experience I
had during my employment at Hogan & Hartson my second year, really reenergized
and re-focused me. I parlayed my clerk/messenger job up into a
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clerkship, thanks to a junior partner at the firm who tried medical malpractice and
personal injury cases primarily, and criminal cases.
Mr. Granof: Who was that?
Judge Urbina: Bob Maynard. He was wonderful. Handsome and just terrifically dynamic, and
after accompanying him to court on a few occasions, I appreciated how the law
unfolded within this venue as well as the skills of a person who would be trying
these factual and legal issues. It was an in-your-face adversarial endeavor that was
very much in keeping with my competitive nature.
Mr. Granof: Was this at the end of your first year?
Judge Urbina: This was just as I was beginning my second year.
Mr. Granof: So that was, I think, an unusual experience in that most law students, at least
when I was going to law school, did not have the opportunity to translate what
they were learning into the real world of practicing law.
Judge Urbina: Right. That’s correct. It was unusual for those days. Now many law schools
have clinical education programs that give students a chance to actually taste what
it’s like to work for someone actually practicing law. In those days, everything
was very academically oriented; everything came out of the book. At least my
recollection is that it was all kind of dry appellate decisions and so forth, but I
really got to understand the anatomy of a controversy by watching Maynard in
depositions and watching him in the courtroom.
Mr. Granof: Were you on scholarship at Georgetown?
Judge Urbina: No. Undergrad, but not at the law school. I got into the law school on my own
merits. I had good law boards, which was a surprise because up until that time I
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hadn’t done very well on standardized tests, meaning that I did well but I didn’t
believe that I had ever performed up to par with what I would have expected of
myself. But the law boards were fine, so no, I wasn’t on scholarship.
Mr. Granof: In those days did you take a prep course to take what today would be the LSAT?
Judge Urbina: No. I read a book. My mother got me a book to prepare for the LSAT, and that
was it.
Mr. Granof: So it must have been hard financially without a scholarship even though law
school tuition wasn’t anywhere near what it is today.
Judge Urbina: I was fortunate because during those days, or in that era, the government was very
responsive to student needs, and I applied for financial aid, and I got it. Not only
did I get it, but also the installment payments were quite reasonable. And then
when I started teaching at Howard Law School in 1974, having graduated in
1970, each year I was there resulted in a certain reduction in the amount of my
indebtedness because teaching at Howard was considered to be putting something
back into the community. So I never felt, certainly not to the extent that some
others felt, and currently what happens, what law students nowadays feel, I never
felt that great pressure. When I graduated law school, I thought I was making a
lot of money. I was making $12,200 a year, and I thought I had struck it rich.
Mr. Granof: And that was adequate at the time?
Judge Urbina: It wasn’t so bad.
Mr. Granof: With regard to your experience in law school, particularly in the first year, were
you terrified?
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Judge Urbina: Yes. I was terrified. I felt very much out of place. Never having taken any lawrelated
courses, like nowadays you may take some political science or other types
of law-related courses in college. I had not done that. I had never even seen the
law school before my first day of school. And of course in those days, maybe at
other schools, but certainly at Georgetown, they would terrify you. It was “Look
to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here by the end of the year.”
My recollection is that out of a class of 900, only 600 returned the second year.
So they did indeed flunk out one-third in the first year. I was one of very few
minorities in the law school. I just felt I was among students who had come well
prepared. They knew about business. Not all the students, obviously, but the
ones I was paying attention to. They kind of knew about business. Their families
had been in business so they had some business background of some kind. So
“terrified” is a good word.
Mr. Granof: Was the course fairly standardized in the first year, so you took property and
criminal law and civil procedure?
Judge Urbina: Yes, and torts. And most of the courses were year-long courses, so you didn’t get
an exam until the end of the second semester.
Mr. Granof: Which made it scary because you had no idea how you were doing.
Judge Urbina: Yes, no practice taking exams. I think one of the courses, it might have been
torts, gave exams at each semester, the other ones did not.
Mr. Granof: Did they use the Socratic method, which was pretty common in those days?
Judge Urbina: Yes, the Socratic method. And the Socratic method I now appreciate the value of,
where you ask a question and then you turn the answer into another question and
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so forth, and I appreciate the exercise, but some professors used it I think much
more effectively than others, and the ones that used it effectively, by the time they
were done with you, you felt, even if you hadn’t gotten all the answers correct or
if you hadn’t cracked the logic that he was interested in, you felt more acquainted
with what you were supposed to know and had better insight into the process.
Other professors, on the other hand, would just kind of demean and criticize and
make fun; it was not a very positive reinforcement.
Mr. Granof: Particularly the first year, it seems to me that they try to train you to “think like a
lawyer,” and at least the second year, they’re trying to bore you to death. I don’t
know if that was your experience?
Judge Urbina: I think actually the way it goes is, and I don’t disagree with this platitude, first
year they would scare you to death; second year they work you to death; third
year they bore you to death.
Mr. Granof: I think that’s right. At least some courses, I think tax was a required course, and I
found that tax was a very difficult subject to teach with the Socratic method.
Judge Urbina: Right. As was civil procedure. A couple courses just did not lend themselves to
that, but I will say this, that after my first year and having performed not up to par
and feeling very much on the edge of deciding not to proceed, I did find that when
I came back the second year that a lot of what I learned the first year really took
root and the thinking process had improved significantly.
Mr. Granof: So you felt more comfortable the second year?
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Judge Urbina: Yes. And I liked the courses the second year. I liked commercial paper, both
sales and transactions, and evidence. It all wasn’t so strange as it had been the
first year.
Mr. Granof: You continued to work at Hogan throughout your second year?
Judge Urbina: Yes. I continued to work at Hogan for the first semester of the second year. The
gentleman I mentioned, Bob Maynard, decided to move back to Cincinnati, which
is where he was from, and I decided that, again, that provided a margin of time
that I could better spend doing my school work. So then the second semester of
my second year I didn’t work. And then in my third year, I volunteered as an
investigator for the Public Defender Service here in town.
Mr. Granof: I’m curious; you had been essentially high performing as an athlete during your
first year, shooting for the Olympic trials, and then you said you cut it off. So did
you get exercise?
Judge Urbina: I continued to jog and run, but it became kind of an adjunct to my daily routine. I
truly needed the exercise in order to keep a relatively stress-free mind.
Mr. Granof: I can understand that.
Judge Urbina: I totally gave up the urge to be competitive.
Mr. Granof: During your three years of law school, is there anything in particular that stands
out in your law school experience, anything that really turned you on or interested
you?
Judge Urbina: There are a couple of things, one that not necessarily turned me on but really
grounded me in a better understanding of what I was doing and what I hoped to
do. First of all, it was the era of the Civil Rights Movement, and I was fortunate
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enough to be around many bright people at the law school – plenty of bright
people there – minorities, African-American, Latino people, out in the community
that were motivated. And of course in the study of law I necessarily encountered
very important cases that were emerging at the time.
It was a revolution, so to speak, in the criminal law around that time in terms of
individual rights and liberties, so all of that prompted me to look more closely at
what it is I might be doing in light of those interests. One of the things that was
unfortunate about that period was that during my first year of law school, I was
still training in hopes of getting to the Olympics, I applied to an organization in
New York, an athletic club, that I hoped would accept me and sponsor me, as I
needed some sort of sponsorship to help me move about the country from time to
time to compete in events, keep up my training, and at the same retain a certain
amount of qualified eligibility to run in other meets.
Mr. Granof: I’m glad you mentioned that because that was such an important part of our
discussions, and I wouldn’t want to skip over that. And this was what year?
Judge Urbina: It would have been going from my first year to the second year, so 1967 to 1968.
Mr. Granof: This was a time after college when in order to compete you needed a sponsorship?
Judge Urbina: Yes, I needed a club, and there were several clubs that would pay for your way to
run an important track meet, say in Detroit, or meets that would have the kind of
visibility but at the same time that were official AAU meets that would record
your time and retain that time as a qualifying time or would enter your time as a
potential qualifying time for the final group that would be permitted to compete at
the Olympic trials. I needed shoes, I needed equipment, and so forth, and all my
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friends — the ones that had decided to continue running after law school and were
from the New Jersey/New York area — had applied to the New York Athletic
Club for sponsorship and had been admitted.
Mr. Granof: Which is a good deal?
Judge Urbina: Absolutely. That was it, that was the paramount organization, quintessential
organization for promoting the success of athletes, I thought, from that area. All
my friends had gotten in, my roommate had gotten in, another fellow with whom I
ran, Bob Zuminsky had gotten in, Jim McDermott, all these fellows who were
really fine athletes and who wanted to continue running had gotten in. But when I
applied, I got silence and then when I followed it up, I got a letter back saying that
their quota had been filled. I don’t know if I was naïve. I knew about the
New York AC’s policies during my college years because the New York AC was
infamous: they were exclusionary, they didn’t permit Jews, they didn’t permit
Latinos, they didn’t permit minority people period to join, and I found this quite
incongruous for a club in the middle of New York. You might have thought
something like that could happen in Alabama or Mississippi, but New York? So I
said now that I’m credentialed, I’ve run well, I’ve been a national champion and
so forth, their policy will change. Well, it did not change. So a couple of my
fellow law students had parents who were quite well placed in the legal
community in New York and who became interested in this issue. The issue got
some visibility when Frank Lipski, who was a writer for the New York Times — I
think I showed you some of his writings — he just died recently, he was a wellknown
sports writer, and he took umbrage at this. He flew down, met with me,
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wrote a series of articles about this, and because of those articles, people became
interested, and some of the law student colleagues of mine came and said, “My
father’s very interested in representing you.” Well, for better or for worse I felt
that I did not want to get any more distracted than I already was, that getting
myself entrenched in litigation while I was trying to study was probably not a
good idea. I had other alternatives, so I joined the Philadelphia Pioneers Club,
which was then a wealthy club and was very interested in having me run with it,
and they wound up helping me go where I needed to go and pay my expenses and
so forth, and were delighted to do so. To this day, I still have some mixed
feelings about whether I did the right thing, whether I should have invested
myself more in fighting this battle because I know the inequities affected other
people after me, although I understand that since then the policy has changed.
Mr. Granof: You would think that it would after a generation.
Judge Urbina: Maybe they changed a while ago; I have not tracked it. Up until about 15 years
ago, I am sure those policies were still in place. Because my brother, Al, lives in
New York, my other brother lives upstate in New York, but the New York AC
was infamous for that type of thing.
Mr. Granof: It’s amazing that they kept that going, up to 15 years ago.
Judge Urbina: Well, their position was, “We’re a private club. We can accept whomever we
want, we can reject whomever we want,” and they never stated it was along racial
lines.
Mr. Granof: So it was very subtle, or at least they tried to keep it subtle.
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Judge Urbina: Well they certainly didn’t make it easy. The facts speak for themselves, but they
didn’t make it easy. I think discrimination was morphing into, as you said,
something more subtle than it had been in the past.
Mr. Granof: Were there some repercussions for the New York Athletic Club in terms of the
publicity beyond this?
Judge Urbina: Yes, there were. The New York Athletic Club was the sponsor of a couple of
truly important track meets. As I mentioned previously, track was then a much
more popular sport. There was weekly television coverage of track meets, and
the NYAC organized a meet every year, an indoor track meet, that was the
premier meet where people would compete in preparation for the Melrose Games,
which was a very popular international event. While I was a first year law
student, Georgetown and other schools decided in protest not to go to that meet,
and interestingly enough, my arch-nemesis when I was a runner at Georgetown, a
fellow by the name of David Patrick who was a fabulous miler and half-miler, led
the protest for Villanova, and about half of the schools, the big-name schools,
bowed out of the meet because of what they learned about the New York AC’s
policy.
Mr. Granof: Apparently this did not cause the New York AC to change its policy.
Judge Urbina: No. I’ll tell you another interesting story because I think it’s relevant to this.
When I was a senior, we ran a track meet outdoors, and the year before I ran,
Tommy Ferrell, who was a very well-known half-miler and was an Olympian, had
won this meet in the half-mile, and I was rostered to run that event, and the meet
was run by the New York AC. This is when I was a senior. So the
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New York AC went out of its way – this is my opinion – to bring in the best halfmilers
they could. There were several wonderful half-milers from Ireland who
were well known, Noel Carroll, Ian Hamilton, and others, and they wanted to
capture this meet. Villanova wanted to capture the meet, but the New York AC
wanted, in my opinion, to make sure that this feature event was captured by
someone that they viewed approvingly. Bob Zuminsky was on my team, and with
David Patrick and Ian Hamilton, it was a star-studded field. We ran the race. I
won the race. At the end of the race, two coaches came over and said, “You
broke the record.” I said, “Oh really.” Actually, the timers, who were from the
New York AC, said that the record was unofficial because only two of the three
timers actually timed the race.
Mr. Granof: And you think that was fishy?
Judge Urbina: Absolutely. And everybody else thought it was fishy too. You don’t forget to
start your stopwatch at a feature event.
Mr. Granof: To me, it’s just astounding because it resonates back to the 1936 Olympics with
Jesse Owens in Germany.
Judge Urbina: You know who Avery Brundage was, right?
Mr. Granof: Yes.
Judge Urbina: Okay, well he was very involved, he was the head of the AAU, he was also very
involved with the New York AC, and there was a whole policy that he dictated in
the area of track and field.
Mr. Granof: So he was a bigot?
Judge Urbina: I think it’s safe to say that. I think his own colleagues said so. So, yes.
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Mr. Granof: It’s just amazing. That’s quite a story. I guess in the end it had a happy ending in
the sense that time and events have caused the New York AC to change, and
hopefully they have different people.
Judge Urbina: Well, everything had a happy ending. This is why I can look back even at
situations that were certainly intensely unpleasant at the time and say that
everything happens for a reason. I mean, if I had made it to the Olympics, who
knows, maybe I would have quit law school; maybe I wouldn’t be a judge. And
as I review the things in my life that have occurred, my wife, my children,
everything, seems to be the product of the fortunate and the unfortunate. When I
say the unfortunate, I mean the fact that even when things were not as I planned,
they developed beautifully.
Mr. Granof: That may be because you have certain qualities. No matter what you would have
done, you would have probably finished successfully.
Judge Urbina: I’d like to think so, but I think I’ve been very fortunate that things have fallen into
place in my life.
Mr. Granof: Getting back to the academics of law school, are there any professors that stood
out particularly?
Judge Urbina: One that stood out was Sam Dash. Remember him?
Mr. Granof: Oh, yes. He was the district attorney of Philadelphia at that point.
Judge Urbina: Exactly. Very famous, Hoffa trials, the whole thing. He was my Criminal Law
professor, and he was very tough.
Mr. Granof: So you really had expert teaching.
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Judge Urbina: Oh boy, did I. And again, people would tell war stories about him, and he would
tell a few about himself, but when you’re there, you’re not as impressed as when
later on you look back at it. So yes, he was one of those people who left a
powerful impression on me. There were two professors who taught a course
together, one was Edwin Cantor, and the other I think was Stuart Greenberg. One
was a lawyer and a doctor, the other was a lawyer, and they taught a course called
Legal Medical Practice. As you know, I had had an interest way back in
medicine, and so the topic was interesting to me, and they taught the course
together, and they were just exquisite. It was a beautifully well-balanced course.
They did not overwork us, but at the same time, they were very demanding and
their interplay, the way they complemented each other, and the way they
comment and agree and disagree, it came just at the right time as I was developing
this appreciation for litigation. This was another example of how important
litigation is, and how important it is to avoid it if you could. So yes, I think those
two gentlemen were wonderful. And one other fellow who cultivated a real
interest in torts for me, which I ultimately wound up teaching on the law school
level, was Professor Crabb, but I can’t remember his first name. He wasn’t a
particularly dynamic fellow. He was small, and he had a wonderful grasp of
ideas. He was not a paper-chase type professor, but he knew how to ask
questions, and he would go from student to student and often would include me,
even when I didn’t raise my hand. After a while I did raise my hand because I
really enjoyed him and he wasn’t one of those intimidating teachers. He knew
how to ask questions and he knew how to use the Socratic method in ways that
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were not embarrassing or demeaning but were, as I said earlier, stimulating and
helped you turn your own consciousness on itself, as to how you were thinking.
He was very good, and I’ve always had a real affection for torts, I really enjoyed
torts, and I think that’s how it started.
Mr. Granof: So it appears that you took an interest in litigation. It looks like that was where
you were headed.
Judge Urbina: Yes. You know, if my parents had been involved in business, I might have gone
into the business end of it. Litigation involved the powers of persuasion. When I
was in high school, I had one very good experience on my feet, and that was
during a debate. I had an English teacher who was just superb – I hated him, but
he was wonderful – and that good experience on my feet left me with an
impression that I could probably be good on my feet at some other point in time.
But that didn’t happen until much later, when I began to see what it was like
working with jurors and looking them in the eye and using the power of
personality as a foundation for the power of persuasion.
Mr. Granof: Did you have any clinical experience other than with Mr. Maynard?
Judge Urbina: I did go to a couple of trials as an investigator for the Public Defender Service.
Mr. Granof: And that was in your third year?
Judge Urbina: That’s correct. And all the criminal trials were here in the U.S. District Court
because there was no Superior Court until 1971. All the criminal cases in the
District of Columbia up until then were tried in the U.S. District Court. And then
the Superior Court was created, and that’s when things changed. But the point is
that I would come over here to the federal court two or three times during that
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semester and watch the trials, watch Judge Bryant, and I’d watch Judge Waddy,
and I’d watch Judge Jones and Judge Pratt, and I got a really kind of interesting
impression of the judge’s function, but more specifically, of the trial process and
the blend of qualities and characteristics and disciplines that one needed to
engage.
Mr. Granof: That’s an extraordinary experience in law school, so you were very fortunate.
Judge Urbina: I was very fortunate. It wasn’t that I sat down and drew up a plan. I just
instinctively did this and that, trying to find a way to feel more and more
comfortable, and that’s what ultimately happened. I was recruited out of
law school by the Public Defender.
Mr. Granof: So you get to your third year of law school, and you’re working as an
investigator. That must have given you an exposure to some interesting cases.
Judge Urbina: Yes, it did, and some serious cases. I worked on two rape cases, two murder
cases, and a couple of other cases. Three of them actually got to court on
motions. I remember one experience in which the lawyer for the Public Defender
Service with whom I was litigating filed a motion to suppress evidence. The
motion came before Judge Bryant.
Mr. Granof: Who the courthouse is named after?
Judge Urbina: Exactly. It was a house that was under surveillance in Georgetown, and there was
a very strong suspicion, rising to probable cause in the issuance of a search
warrant, that marijuana was being stored there and then shipped off to purchasers.
In Georgetown if a house is on two streets, the first floor on one street may be the
second or third floor on the other because the houses are built on hills. The search
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warrant was defective in that it authorized a search of the second floor, not the
third floor, and when the warrant was executed, they found the stuff on the third
floor. The lawyer I was working for said that’s not what the warrant says. I said
to myself, “I want to see how the judge resolves this one” because it was just a
plain mistake.
Mr. Granof: So how did he resolve it?
Judge Urbina: He said the evidence is suppressed because the warrant was not correct, and it
was certainly not exact,. He said that when you’re going to surveil a house, and
you’re going to invade people’s privacy, even if it’s a house where there’s
marijuana, the warrant has to be correct and exact. I thought that was interesting.
Mr. Granof: You graduated from law school in 1970?
Judge Urbina: Exactly, and I took the bar in 1970. And then we had to wait for the results. This
is kind of a cute story. In those days, The Washington Post had the names of the
people who passed the bar the night before they actually came out officially. I
was having dinner with a priest that night, and I excused myself for a minute, and
I went to the phone and I called The Washington Post and asked if they had the
results of the bar exam. This was in November. The bar exam had been in July.
They said they did, and I asked if they had a minute to look and see if I made it.
“Yeah, sure, what’s your name?” I said, “Urbina, U-R-B-I-N-A, first name,
Ricardo.” There’s this long, long pause. I hear him flipping, flipping, flipping,
and then flipping back, flipping back. I was thinking “Oh no, oh no.” So he says,
“I’m sorry, your name’s not here.” I said, “Are you sure?” He says, “Yeah,
Urbina, R-U-B-I-N-A.” I said, “No, no, no, U-R….” So he goes back, “Yeah,
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it’s here, it’s here!” It was heart attack city. But anyway, so in 1971, working for
the Public Defender, after I just passed the bar they started giving me cases. I
tried my first murder case when I was 25, in 1971. I tried three others before I left
the Public Defender, but the first one involved a young lady who had shot her
boyfriend between the eyes accidentally. I felt that I was equipped on a technical
level, but I felt kind of emotionally overwhelmed by the responsibility of
representing this woman who was definitely going to prison if – the case was
before probably one of the smartest judges I’ve ever appeared before, and that
was Leonard Braman. Do you know him?
Mr. Granof: I’ve heard the name, yes.
Judge Urbina: Wonderful judge. Very technical oriented and tough.
Mr. Granof: He was a Superior Court judge, right?
Judge Urbina: Yes, Superior Court judge. And then I tried another murder case. It was a
shooting at the Whitelaw Hotel. I don’t know if you know where that is. It’s
downtown here, and was a Whitelaw Hotel back from the 1800s when only white
people could stay there, but it’s located in an African-American part of the city.
This fellow was patrolling the halls – it was a very bad neighborhood in those
days – with a shotgun at the request of the owner, and some other guy had it out
for him. The long and the short of it is that the other guy started coming up the
stairs, and the defendant raised his rifle and shot, and the bullet went through the
door, ricocheted off the stairwell, ricocheted off that door, and as the guy was
coming up the stairs, hit him, and he died. The wonderful lawyer that I worked
with, Paul Chernoff, was lead counsel and is now a judge in Massachusetts. I
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don’t know if you know him. Paul Chernoff. I had this big Afro, and they still
tease me over at the Public Defender’s because they still have a picture of me.
We went to the Whitelaw Hotel and we drew string to track the path of the bullet
to demonstrate that it could not have been an intentional killing, that he was just
trying to scare the guy, because the guy wasn’t even within sight. We tracked the
bullet, and I was peeking out as though I was shooting a gun. Ultimately, the
government dismissed the case.
Mr. Granof: That’s an extraordinary story.
Judge Urbina: And that’s Paul Chernoff. All I did was tag along on that one. It was very
interesting.
Mr. Granof: Let me go back just a little bit. It occurred to me that you were in law school in
1968, correct?
Judge Urbina: Yes.
Mr. Granof: And 1968 was certainly a time of troubles in D.C.
Judge Urbina: Indeed. On the day the riots started, I drove through the riots on my motorcycle
on my way home, and it was a terribly emotional experience for me. I remember
stopping at a light on the way home, not far from me, it must have been maybe
L Street, and this crowd came down the street, and they picked up a trashcan and
threw it through the window of a liquor store. Everyone was so angry because of
the death of Martin Luther King. There were a lot of protests. It was a time when
you could not help but think about what was happening in this country.
Mr. Granof: So you get to your third year of law school, and you’ve been an investigator, and I
don’t know how many cases you handled as an investigator.
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Judge Urbina: Not that many. Maybe five or six cases, where I actually went out and spoke to
witnesses. I sat in on the briefings on other cases, but maybe five or six at most.
Mr. Granof: And clearly your experience gave you a taste for this kind of litigation. So you
get to your third year. Was there a military draft at that point?
Judge Urbina: Yes, there was a draft. I took my physical at Fort Holabird., and I failed it
because I’m asthmatic.
Mr. Granof: So you didn’t have to worry about that?
Judge Urbina: No. I wasn’t a 4F, but I was low on the totem pole.
Mr. Granof: Vietnam was still in the picture.
Judge Urbina: Yes. Vietnam was still in the picture.
Mr. Granof: So essentially you had to make a decision as to what you’re going to do after
law school. When did you make a decision, and how did you make it?
Judge Urbina: Well, I applied to the Public Defender Service. I remember writing the letter, and
I got a letter of support from Stan Harris, who was then a partner at Hogan &
Hartson and who took a liking to me. He later became Judge of the Superior
Court and subsequently of this court. I figured that I wanted to do something that
was more or less public interest and in keeping with my desire to make a
difference. Again, because I didn’t have a business background, I didn’t think
that it was realistic for me to think about business law. I didn’t have the
confidence to pursue anything along those lines, certainly not by myself. So
while I was trying to make up my mind, I applied to the PDS. I got an interview
and then I got the acceptance, I didn’t really have to do very much after that.
Mr. Granof: Did you apply elsewhere?
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Judge Urbina: No, I never applied anywhere else because this was what I wanted, and it
happened.
Mr. Granof: Was this a time, unlike say the present and the past ten years, in which students
particularly were very conscious of moving into public service or doing things
that made a difference?
Judge Urbina: I can’t say generally, but if I had to guess, I would say most of the Georgetown
people went into business.
Mr. Granof: Law firms? Or corporate counsels’ offices?
Judge Urbina: Yes, law firms or business-oriented. Yes. That’s what I think. Now, the most
outspoken people in the class, meaning people who not only spoke out in class but
people who made their ambitions known, all wanted to go into the criminal law
arena. They wanted to be Edward Bennett Williams or they wanted to be F. Lee
Bailey. So there was that kind of contingent of, you know, “I’m going to be a
great criminal lawyer.” Joe diGenova was in my class; he became the United
States Attorney, first an Assistant and then the United States Attorney. So there
was a movement towards that type of work, but I wouldn’t say there was a big
surge to get into public service. Maybe at Howard Law School, where there was
a different mindset.
Mr. Granof: So your third year you get accepted at the Public Defender’s. I presume you have
to go through a bar review course?
Judge Urbina: Yes. I did that. I took the bar review course while I was in school. I think this
was the first time that Bar-Bri was offered, and Sherm Cohen, who was a
professor at Georgetown, started Bar-Bri, and I took that course, and I took my
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time with it. I started studying for the bar in March and took the exam in July. So
I took the long course. I could not imagine why some of my friends wanted to
take this three or four week course and kind of cram everything in. That didn’t
make sense to me. So I took the longer course where you go on the weekends and
then at the end it’s a kind of repetition. The intensified course is the one that the
other people take, but you’ve already been through the less-intensified program.
So I took the bar, and I found out in November, and I passed it the first time.
Mr. Granof: So here you are, you’re a lawyer, and you’re at the Public Defender’s where you
had some understanding, some experience of what they do and how they do it,
and you report for work, and what do they say, “Here’s your first case?”
Judge Urbina: Well, that’s a good question because I have such vivid memories of this. The
Public Defender’s Service was then known as the Legal Aid Agency.
Mr. Granof: How big was it? How many lawyers?
Judge Urbina: I’d say nine or ten.
Mr. Granof: So it was small?
Judge Urbina: Very small. And it was just in transition to becoming the Public Defender
Service. It was what was called the Community Defense Organization, CDO.
Mr. Granof: Funded by the government?
Judge Urbina: Funded by the government. Exactly. And so there were a few lawyers there who
had been there for a couple years. They were very experienced; there was a class
of lawyers, my class that came in. I was one of four minority people that came in
that group, and I got a supervisor, Larry Schwartz. I don’t know if you’ve ever
heard of him. He was wonderful. He’s passed away at a very young age. It was
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a very collegial, intense environment in that the training was very intense. You
went through a three-week training program, from 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning
until whenever it was over, sometimes 7:00 or 8:00 at night.
Mr. Granof: I’m curious what the training consisted of. Was it like the National Institute of
Trial Advocacy – NITA – program?
Judge Urbina: Yes, it was something like that. You got a lot of materials to read, you got a lot of
cases to read, there was some aspect of lecture, but a lot of it was dealing with
direct examination, hypotheticals, exercises – direct examination, cross
examination.
Mr. Granof: Putting you through a mock trial?
Judge Urbina: Exactly. How to deal with the burden of proof and that type of thing over and
over and over again. And then at the end of that training, you got a caseload, and
you were to report to your supervisor, but these cases were yours.
Mr. Granof: How many cases did they assign you?
Judge Urbina: Well, it wasn’t terribly onerous. The most number of cases I had at any one time
was 50.
Mr. Granof: That’s a lot.
Judge Urbina: It is a lot of cases. But fortunately they weren’t all coming to trial at the same
time so they were at various stages. So if a case was coming to trial, I also was
looking at the investigation of another case, so I was engaged in different aspects
of trial preparation or case preparation.
Mr. Granof: Did you have an investigator to help you?
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Judge Urbina: I did. A law student. I actually had three, and they were all very good. One of
them later on became president of the bar.
Mr. Granof: Who is the person that became president of the bar?
Judge Urbina: I’m trying to remember her name. Very, very lovely lady. Her name will come
back to me. She was president of the bar here, if I recall. She and a friend of hers
did criminal investigations for us. She was at Georgetown at the time.
Mr. Granof: So they give you cases to start, and do they give you, I wouldn’t say easier cases,
but the less serious cases, or did they give you a major felony to start with?
Judge Urbina: No. That’s an important question, and as you ask it, it comes back to me. I
started off by dealing with juvenile cases. In those days, juvenile cases were jury
trials. It was before McKeiver v. Pennsylvania where the Supreme Court decided
that the Constitution did not entitle juveniles to jury trials.
Mr. Granof: What was the case you just mentioned?
Judge Urbina: McKeiver v. Pennsylvania. And so even before I got the results of my bar exam, I
was assigned to the Family Division of the court where I would help. Under the
Student Practice Rule, because I hadn’t gotten admitted to the bar yet, I would
represent juveniles who were charged, and I would try to work out the bond
situation when they came before a commissioner. In those days they were
commissioners. I would try to arrange for this person to either go home or to go
to an appropriate facility if it was a drug issue. So I got my feet wet there.
Mr. Granof: Some of these juvenile cases can be serious — major felony cases — but I don’t
know if they started you out with that?
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Judge Urbina: No, my recollection is that they were mostly misdemeanor type cases for the first
month or two and then some of the more serious cases began to pop in.
Mr. Granof: Such as?
Judge Urbina: This homicide case where this young lady shot her boyfriend.
Mr. Granof: The misdemeanor cases were?
Judge Urbina: They were almost all petty larceny, disorderly conduct, soliciting for prostitution,
simple assault. Now in those days, simple assault was a misdemeanor but it was
jury triable. Unlawful entry. That’s pretty much it. Oh, carrying a concealed
weapon.
Mr. Granof: So you get your first jury trial case. Do you remember your first jury trial? I’m
sure you do.
Judge Urbina: I definitely remember it. It’s the one that I mentioned where the young lady shot
her boyfriend.
Mr. Granof: The first jury trial case you had was a homicide?
Judge Urbina: Yes. And because she was a juvenile at the time, if I lost the case she would be
put in an institution until she was 21. They did not view it as being the same as
an adult homicide case, which would be a different story. The interesting thing
about this case was that this young lady was from the south, North Carolina, and
had come to Washington, D.C. to live with her aunt because the conditions down
south were not good for her. So while living with her aunt she took up with this
fellow who was a city guy and looked slick, and they got to liking each other a
lot. He was kind of a juvenile delinquent type, he had a gun, and he brought it
over one day. The long and short of it is that she was playing with it and it went
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off and shot the guy exactly right between the eyes. So during the trial – this is
the one before Judge Leonard Braman – during the trial, the prosecutor comes
over, and this is during the government’s case, and he says, “Are you going to put
your client on the stand?” and I said, “No, I don’t think so,” and he said, “I think
you better.” “Why’s that?” “Because we’ve got a bit of evidence that you may
not know about yet.” I said, “What is that?” He says, “Well, your client is
pregnant, and she’s pregnant by the deceased, and I’ve got a witness who’s going
to get on the stand and say that she was violently jealous of the fact that the
deceased was seeing other women and one in particular,” and there lies the
motive. But up until then, it was an accident. What else could it have been? It
was an accident. She loves the guy.
Mr. Granof: So in the middle of the trial, he dumps this on you?
Judge Urbina: Yes, and she had not said a word about this, nothing. So I took her back, and we
had this conversation. I said, “I may have to put you on the stand, are you ready
for that?” and she says yes. So I put her on the stand, and she testified that she
wouldn’t kill him if she was going to have his baby, which is a pretty powerful
argument. So she was acquitted, and she went right back to North Carolina right
after that. It wasn’t a causation issue, it was just a matter of intent; did she intend
to do this or not? That was the only issue the jury really had to focus on.
Mr. Granof: You must have felt pretty good about that.
Judge Urbina: I felt great. I mean I felt proud and I felt happy because I knew my supervisor
was going to be happy.
Mr. Granof: Who was the head of the PDS?
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Judge Urbina: A woman named Barbara Babcock. The PDS was criticized for not having
enough minority lawyers, and Barbara Babcock made an effort to remedy that.
She had recruited me from law school, and so when I came there were three other
African-American attorneys, and I think we felt, certainly a couple of us at least
felt, because I remember when we had this conversation, that it was important for
us to live up to the standards, and to demonstrate that we could live up to the
standards, of the office. So that was another reason why that victory at the outset
was kind of real fun.
Mr. Granof: The name Barbara Babcock rings a bell. Was she an assistant attorney general at
some point?
Judge Urbina: Yes, and indeed she was in town recently to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the
Public Defender Service. I saw her, and during a reception, I publicly thanked her
for going out of her way to recruit me and other minority attorneys. And later on
she came back to me and said “Thank you very much for saying that.”
Mr. Granof: I don’t see how the Public Defender Service could have functioned on into the
1970s and 1980s given the demographics of Washington as an elite white
institution.
Judge Urbina: True. But Barbara Babcock was ahead of the curve, and you have to remember
that here at the U.S. District Court, for example, there were almost no minority
law clerks. There were a couple of minority judges when I started here, but prior
to that time, there were almost no minority judges. The Public Defender Service
in the District of Columbia was then — and still is — considered to be the best in
the country because it started this tradition of recruiting only the elite. Several of
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the people that came in were either from Ivy League schools or were just brilliant
law review people, and you didn’t always find minorities among that strata of the
legal community. But as you can see, it still is the premier public defender
service in the country and it certainly hasn’t suffered from the fact that it’s well
populated by minorities.
Mr. Granof: And one of the reasons that it’s an attractive place to work is it’s one of the few
places that you can get hands-on trial experience?
Judge Urbina: True. On the defender’s side, yes. Plus it’s in an ideal locale, and you have
federal prosecutors trying the cases even though you’re in a state court.
Mr. Granof: What difference would that make? Are they better quality lawyers?
Judge Urbina: Oh, yes. The assistant U.S. attorneys are very high quality, high technical quality
trial attorneys. They go through a lot of training, they’re very carefully screened,
they’re well-credentialed, and usually they have had some years of experience
before they’re invited to come on. It’s a very difficult position to get, and it’s
understood to be a position from which you can launch into just about anything
you want to do, because when you come out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, people
know you’ve worked under pressure, you’ve done trial work, you’ve been where
the rubber hits the road. To have that on the state level as well as on the federal
level means that you as a defender have to deal with that.
Mr. Granof: So you’re trying a whole different variety of cases.
Judge Urbina: Variety of cases and quality of representation on the government’s side.
Mr. Granof: How long were you with the Public Defender Service?
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Judge Urbina: A little over two years and then a good friend from law school, Howard Libby and
I, decided that we’d go into private practice. His family was a wealthy real estate
family here in Washington, he was from Washington, and his family and I got
along very well, and he and I got along very well, and he was going to do mostly
commercial litigation, which I was willing to learn. Again, I didn’t have the
business background, but at this point, I believed that I could learn almost
anything.
Mr. Granof: Because you were a litigator? That’s the way litigators think.
Judge Urbina: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly correct. So we tried it, and the assumption, or
the presumption, that we had premised our partnership on was that we would get
plenty of overflow business from his parents’ real estate. His father wasn’t a
lawyer, but he was a very successful real estate businessman. That didn’t happen.
I guess these people, these people meaning the potential clients, didn’t want to
entrust their big money deals to these two guys who are wet behind the ears. So
we got some business, but I had to go back into criminal law in order to make sure
the firm made money, and that’s when I had some of the most interesting cases
that I tried before going to Howard three years later to teach.
Mr. Granof: Let me finish up with the Public Defender Service. You were there for
approximately two years. How many cases would you say you tried over that
period?
Judge Urbina: I’d say I tried 14 felony cases, about half of them non-jury trials.
Mr. Granof: Jury trials?
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Judge Urbina About seven or eight jury trials, including jury trials for juveniles that would have
been felonies if brought against an adult, for example murder. I’d say of those,
I’d say that I had six of those juvenile cases, and the rest were just felony cases.
Mr. Granof: But a jury trial is a jury trial whether it involves a juvenile or not.
Judge Urbina: Yes. And the thing was that the cases came very quickly. In fact, there was a
joke that I would never make it to thirteen in a row because thirteen is an unlucky
number. Jury and non-jury verdicts, I had twelve acquittals in a row, and I was
shooting for thirteen, and thirteen was a mixed verdict, so I didn’t get a full
acquittal.
Mr. Granof: So you had twelve acquittals in a row?
Judge Urbina: Yes, in a row. And, yes, I did.
Mr. Granof: That’s a terrific record.
Judge Urbina: It is. I don’t want to take full credit for it because the training was good and the
cases were right. I tried cases that could be won. I didn’t have clients that said “I
don’t care, just try the case, I know there’s no chance.” And usually the client
would say, well you know, “What do you think?” And I’d tell them, and if I felt
we could win it, I’d say I couldn’t guarantee, but there’s a chance we could win
this. So that’s what we did.
Mr. Granof: And you had clients as well that you told this is the time to get a plea?
Judge Urbina: Yes, and there were times when I would go to the U.S. Attorney and say, “Listen,
this guy has had a bad life, his mother’s a junkie.” And I would try to do the
things that lawyers do when they’re trying to present the other side of the equation
to the prosecutor.
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Mr. Granof: So you had a terrific record. Irving Younger, the noted teacher of evidence and
trial tactics, says that to be an experienced jury trial lawyer you need 25 cases
under your belt, and the only place you get it is either the U.S. Attorney’s Office
or the Public Defender’s or something similar. And you accomplished that.
Judge Urbina: Yes, I mean certainly before I came on the bench I had more than 25 under my
belt because I got to try several felony cases while I was teaching at Howard Law
School. The deans at the law school — and I served under three or four of them —
were trial attorneys. So when I told them that if I’m going to teach criminal
procedure, if I’m going to direct a criminal justice clinic, I have to have ongoing
experience in that; otherwise, I’m teaching from a limited basis. They all
understood, and they said just don’t let that interfere with your teaching.
Mr. Granof: You tried 25 cases over a two-year period?
Judge Urbina: Twenty cases, yes. During my Public Defender service I tried about 14 felony
cases, and about half were jury trials. During my seven years on the Howard
faculty I tried some additional cases on my own or in a supervisory capacity.
Mr. Granof: Plus handling other cases in which you had to decide whether to go to trial or get
a plea? That must have been fairly intense.
Judge Urbina: It was. And I’d say as I look back that I had the best of both worlds because
while I was at the Public Defender Service I had a bevy of incredibly bright and
supportive colleagues. Then when I went into private practice, even then, even if I
was doing some civil stuff, some depositions, and this and that, I was still able to
return to the criminal practice to kind of reinforce me. And then when I was at
Howard, I had an army of students who were dying to help me. So I had the best
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of both worlds because I never lacked support, which I think is a big ingredient in
what some might say is success.
Mr. Granof: So it strikes me that you thrived on litigation.
Judge Urbina: I did. I loved it. I still love it. And I tell the jury this: I say my favorite part of
the job is working with juries, then as a lawyer and now as a judge. I love to
watch well-tried cases; it’s a work of art. I just love it. I love to watch good
lawyers at work. I love to watch how they explore and probe and how they get
the job done, how they exert their powers of persuasion. And the flip side of that
is I have a very low tolerance for lawyers who don’t prepare or lawyers who
cheat.
Mr. Granof: I can understand that. Now, I think Irving Younger says that he thinks the jury is
the smartest person in the room collectively. Do you agree with that?
Judge Urbina: Absolutely. Absolutely true, and for the longest time, my gut told me that, but I’ll
tell you how I now have empirically validated that. I teach a course called “The
American Jury.” I’ve taught it for about 15 or 16 years at GW, and it’s a graduate
course. During one of the thirteen sessions that constitute the course, I invite
jurors who have been in trials before me to come in and to tell these lawyers what
it is that the lawyers they saw did to impress them, what they did well, what they
didn’t do well, how jurors think, what they notice, what they observe, how they
deliberated, what they considered important, were they able to follow the judge’s
instructions, and so forth. I mean it’s fascinating. I let jurors ask questions after
re-direct examination. I allow them to after re-direct examination. I look over,
they hold up a piece of paper, I read the question, the lawyers read the question,
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and the lawyers tell me whether or not they want me to ask the question, and if
they do I’ll ask the question. And, invariably, in the beginning the lawyers —
especially defense attorneys — say “Oh, you know, this is terrible.” Well, as it
turns out, the lawyers love it because they get insight into what the jury is
thinking, and half the time, more than half the time, the lawyers look at the
question and say, “Oh, the jurors don’t understand something because we’re using
jargon, legal jargon, we’ve failed to explain what the basis is for this and that, and
so that tells me something.” Then, when we have these classes, the jurors are so
intelligent. Some of them are extremely articulate, some are less articulate, but
that’s not the point. Rather, the point is the things that they deduce about the
evidence and what is really going on. They’ll say something, for example, “Well,
yeah, we thought he did it. But when we talked, we said it looks like he did it, but
the government didn’t prove it.” I mean, what else can you say? There’s the
essence of it. You know they can follow the court’s instructions. They can
presume this person innocent, even in the face of some incriminating evidence, if
they have a reasonable doubt, and they’re always able to articulate reasonable
doubt. So I totally agree with Irving Younger.
Mr. Granof: Now as a trial attorney, in the two years that you tried a number of cases before
juries, did you also try any just before judges?
Judge Urbina: Yes. Rarely. I tried one case before Judge Gesell when I was on the Howard
faculty. It t was the result of my suing the Catholic church on the basis of
discrimination, because my secretary at Howard Law School, her daughter was
told that she could not return at the end of the summer to her high school, and the
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reason that the priest offered was that she had been late in paying tuition. My
secretary was a very sweet lady, a single mother, she said, “You know, I told him
I now have the money so I can pay the money, and school hasn’t started yet, but
he said no.” And in addition to that she said, “I know other parents who have
been late, and their children were allowed to return.” And I said, “Well, how do
you explain that?” And she said, “They’re all white.” She was in Montgomery
County, it was a nice Catholic school, Irish priest, the brogue, the whole thing. So
I called him up. I said, “Father, I teach at Howard Law School,” and told him
about my secretary’s experience.” I said, “Can you see your way clear to let her
in because this is really harsh, she’s a single mother.” He says, “Oh no, we can’t
do that,” and he hangs up. So I call back the next day and I said, “Father, I went
to Catholic school myself and I have a real appreciation for a Catholic education
and so does Mrs. Whitman, so could you just see your way clear? She tells me
there will not be any more problems; she thinks she got a child support payment
late.” The priest replied, “No, I told you I’m not going to do that.” So I said fine
and then drafted a complaint that named the bishop, every single member of the
Catholic hierarchy, including the priest, and sought a temporary restraining order.
Herb Reed, who was then the dean of the law school joined the case. So we went
to court before Judge Gesell. Do you remember Judge Gesell?
Mr. Granof: I do indeed.
Judge Urbina: He was a no-nonsense fellow.
Mr. Granof: And smart.
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Judge Urbina: Smart as can be. Anyway, so I stand up and make my opening remarks. I say I
have available a witness, Mrs. Whitman, and the array of lawyers from
Hamilton & Hamilton – do you know that firm?
Mr. Granof: I’ve heard of them.
Judge Urbina: It used to be the firm that represented the Archdiocese of Washington,
representing the Church in matters coming before the local courts. So the long
and the short of it is we get there and Judge Gesell looks over, looks at me, looks
at them, looks at me, and says, “What is this about?” I tell him, and the Church’s
lawyers say that’s a distortion of truth, it’s a contract, she failed to live up to the
contract, and the school just can’t afford to proceed with its function when people
don’t pay on time. So I responded, “Well, I’ve also got a witness that will say
that students who have failed to pay their tuition on time who happen to be white
are currently enrolled in the school.” Big silence. So he says, “Call your
witness.” So I put Ms. Whitman on the stand, she testifies, she breaks down and
cries, very credible. They barely even cross-examine her because they figure
better leave her alone. Then they put the priest on the stand, and the same thing
happened then as I’ve seen happen in several of these Title VII cases that I’ve
presided over, at least three that I can think of, where the defendant loses because
of sheer arrogance which is irrepressible.
Mr. Granof: It comes out.
Judge Urbina: Exactly. It’s just there, and Judge Gesell sits back, and listens to the testimony. I
cross-examine a little bit, not much, and he says, “Sit down.” I see him gesturing
and talking, and the last thing I hear is “Settle it.” They settled it. And I settled it.
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Mr. Granof: This is after you were with the Public Defender?
Judge Urbina: This is when I was teaching at Howard. This was my secretary.
Mr. Granof: In the time that you were with the Public Defender, those two years, were there
any insights that you developed in dealing with juries that were perhaps useful? I
know that the trial advocacy courses basically teach that each attorney has to
develop his own style, what works for “A” may not work for “B.”
Judge Urbina: Absolutely. Well, I think what worked for me was an ability to credibly
communicate with the jury as well as with the judge. I was able to find a point,
either a point of law, but usually a point of fact, that I could translate into the
mindset of the average person, and while some lawyers believe that in order to
win a case you have to change a jury’s beliefs, my theory was you don’t have to
change a jury’s beliefs, you just have to change their attitude, because attitude is
much easier to change. You don’t have to persuade them to give up their beliefs
to change their attitude. If you change their attitude, they’ll carve an exception
out of what they believe for the sake of this particular case, and that’s what I was
able to do.
Mr. Granof: When you say “change their attitude,” would that mean essentially develop a trust
with the jurors, so that the jurors basically say, “I can trust him”?
Judge Urbina: “I can trust him, and I understand his point of view.” I’ll give you an example. I
tried a civil case involving a woman who was assaulted by a police officer in a
situation where the woman had just driven a bunch of elderly people to the site of
an election, and the opposing camp – this was a local election – the opposing
camp, somebody called the police and said that this woman – who was a very
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kind of upper middle class African-American woman – had a gun. The police
officer comes to the scene and he’s drunk. So he comes to the scene, he’s got a
lot of alcohol on his breath, and he acted strange. He approaches my client, and
he says, “You have a gun?” and she says, “No I don’t have any gun.” He says,
“Well let me see your purse.” She says, “No, you can’t look in my purse.” Well
he grabs the purse and she resists, and he yanks it and pulls her shoulder out. No
gun, of course. I was asking for a lot of damages in this case, her reputation, her
pain and suffering, doctors’ bills, and so forth. So at closing argument, I said
several things. The other side was trying to change the jury’s perception to
believe that this pulling of the pocketbook off the shoulder could not possibly
have done this much damage. And they buttressed it with other inferences. So
when I got up to do my rebuttal, one of the things I said was, “When God made
this world, he made rocks and he made roses.” And I walked over to my client,
and I put my hands on her shoulder, and I said, “And when He made Mrs. So-and-
So, he made a rose. Roses are fragile.” And I could tell that that kind of
resonated, and all it was was tweaking of that theory that says you take your
victim as you find them. And then of course I ask for the instruction on that as
well to kind of fortify my argument. But that’s what I mean. They may have
believed, well generally speaking, an incident like that doesn’t result in such
serious injury, but I was able to change their attitude for this case.
Mr. Granof: She must have been an attractive witness as well.
Judge Urbina: She was very attractive, she was sophisticated, and she was there doing work for
free, trying to get people to vote type of thing.
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Mr. Granof: I’m surprised the government didn’t settle that one.
Judge Urbina: Well, you’d be surprised at cases the government doesn’t settle, even today.
You’d be surprised. They kind of dig in, and sometimes they simply decide
they’re not going to settle no matter what.
Mr. Granof: Well, I’ve taken up a lot of your time. Thank you.
