Richard Hibey Interview 1

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Oral History of Richard Hibey, Esq.
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is James Rocap, and the interviewee
is Richard Hibey. The interview took place in Dick Hibey’s home on Cathedral Avenue on
Tuesday, May 9, 2023. This is the first interview.
MR. ROCAP: Dick, it’s great to see you and appreciate your doing this because it’s
important, certainly to the history of the courts here given your background
and how much involvement you’ve had with the courts. I think it will be
hopefully fun for you to go back over the many years that you’ve had with
the court.
Let’s start, if you will, with your family background. I know from our own
conversations that you don’t like to speak about yourself very much, but if
you could give us a little bit about your family background, your parents,
where they came from, when you were born, where you were born. Those
kinds of things. That would be helpful.
MR. HIBEY: First of all, let me thank you for arranging this session, if you will. It’s
something I never thought would involve my participation. So with that
expression of gratitude, I’ll go forward.
In response to your question, I was born June 20, 1941, in Utica, New York.
My parents were an immigrant couple. My mother was first-generation
Lebanese, and my father was born in Lebanon. They had four children, and
I’m sure there was an economic struggle to raise us in the fashion that they
did because now that I know better, it must have been a real struggle for them
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without educations beyond 10th grade and secretarial school to give us what
they did.
MR. ROCAP: What was your father’s employment?
MR. HIBEY: He was a salesman of various and sundry food items that made it to the
shelves of grocery stores. I hesitate to say supermarkets because I don’t
think they were in existence for much of the time. He worked constantly.
Mom, who had secretarial skills and was trained for that, was a stay-at-home
mother. They lived, and we lived, with a saintly figure in my grandmother
on my father’s side, my father’s mother. We were four children, two parents,
and one grandmother living in an amazingly small flat in a two-family home.
MR. ROCAP: Could you estimate the square footage? Maybe 2,000 or less?
MR. HIBEY: I really don’t have a sense of square footage, but I can tell you that we never
felt overcrowded, even though we had as many as three people sleeping in
one room every night, and we all shared one bathroom.
MR. ROCAP: Were your siblings all boys?
MR. HIBEY: No. I have a sister, Nancy, who is a year and ten months younger than I am.
She was in social studies and social work and was an alcohol and drug
counselor. She received her degree from Le Moyne College and her master’s
degree from Syracuse University.
My brother Joe, Joey, was born three years after me. He was a graduate of
Notre Dame University, volunteered into the Marines, came back, got a
master’s degree from MIT and then a doctorate from Washington University
in St. Louis.
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Eight years after my birth, my brother James, Jimmy, was born. He, too,
went to Notre Dame and majored in Engineering. He came to visit my wife
and me just before his either junior or senior year at Notre Dame. I happened
to be trying a robbery case prosecuting eight people who held up a bank, and
before the visit was complete and he was on his way back to Notre Dame, he
told me that that was it for engineering. He wanted to be a lawyer, and a trial
lawyer at that. I get a big kick out of it because that’s exactly what he did.
MR. ROCAP: He’s now a well-known professional at Steptoe and Johnson and one of my
partners.
MR. HIBEY: That’s correct. That is the case
MR. HIBEY: When you look on it, my parents educated four kids who got ten degrees.
That reminds me that after I got my master of laws as a Prettyman fellow,
and we’ll talk about that in further detail, I can remember my father rubbing
his hands together and saying “Well, what’s next? Where do you get your
next degree?” I said “Dad, it’s over. I’ve done twenty-some odd years of
school. It’s time for me to go out and see what I’ve got in me.” But he was
ready to support another year or so of education. That’s what motivated my
parents. They never spoke about anything other than our going to school and
getting an education because that’s what you could do in America, and the
four of us did it completely with their help.
MR. ROCAP: That’s an impressive record for four siblings from one family to do all that
you have done educationally. Where do you think the smarts and the drive
came from for the four of you to accomplish that?
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MR. HIBEY: It manifested itself in different ways as between my parents. My mother was
really smart and deprived economically of the opportunity to get an
education. She knew that. She never stopped to complain about her lot. She
did make it very clear that that was her lot and the kids were going to have a
different path to realization of what we call now the American dream. And
happily, it worked out that way.
My father never thought otherwise than mom in this regard, but he wasn’t as
driven as intense about it as my mother was. He was a perfect complement
to her and she to him.
MR. ROCAP: That’s wonderful. You were born in Utica. Where did you grow up?
MR. HIBEY: I grew up in Utica. It was a strictly middle-class, probably lower-middleclass
environment. There were certain things that were available to me and
my whole family that really have to be factored into the picture of who we
are. There were the nuns.
MR. ROCAP: I was going to ask you. So grade school, what was your grade school
experience? Catholic school?
MR. HIBEY: Catholic school for eight years taught by nuns who were motherly in all of
the wonderful ways that are necessary for children to grow up and move on.
The sisters therefore were responsible for the first eight years of my
education. I then moved on to a Catholic high school run by the Xaverian
brothers.
MR. ROCAP: What was the name of the high school?
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MR. HIBEY: Saint Francis de Sales. It was one of two Catholic high schools in the city.
The city, although relatively small, had a heavy Catholic presence. The
Xaverian brothers were there for many years.
MR. ROCAP: What was the name of your grade school?
MR. HIBEY: Grade school was Sacred Heart.
MR. ROCAP: Was there any particular teacher, one of the nuns, during grade school who
you think had more of an impact on your work ethic and drive and so on than
others?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. The Mother Superior asked me at my mother’s request to stand up in
front of the 8th grade class, and this was when I was in 5th grade, and recite
from memory the Gettysburg Address. Mom had always said I had to know
it. Remember, she was not educated, but she felt very strongly about the
Gettysburg Address. “Richard memorized it,” she let the Mother Superior
know. The Mother Superior then put me in front of the 8th grade, and I had
to recite it. Then there were other speaking opportunities for a grade
schooler, most notably in my memory was fire prevention week. I gave a
speech sitting on a fire engine that visited the school during National Fire
Prevention Week. I gave a little speech about fire prevention and being
careful. It was exposure to an audience that was there to listen to you, and
that, frankly, was very empowering.
MR. ROCAP: Did you have any nerves before?
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MR. HIBEY: No. I was too dumb to know to have nerves about something like that. I
knew it. I had already memorized my speech, which I had to write, so it was
not a problem.
Also, the nuns entered me in the National Spelling Bee. So for three years at
least, during Spelling Bee season, and as I reflect on it, it was a pretty long
season, I would go over to the convent at night once and twice a week to sit
with Sister Jean Martin, and she would give me words, and I would have to
spell them.
MR. ROCAP: How far did you go?
MR. HIBEY: I made the state finals. I did well one year in the written portion of the exam,
but I never got higher than the fourth in the overall testing. It was something
that repeated itself during those years that I didn’t understand until much
later in life, and that is I had just enough dyslexia to make the same mistake
four years running. I would switch letters. So I could remember simple
words like mausoleum, dudgeon, rotogravure. If you look at those words,
what’s common to them, and this I didn’t understand, was that those were
easy words to imagine but even easier to flip “d” and “g.” I’m still stuck on
rotogravure. Mausoleum, “eum,” not “uem.” So I was history there. But it
was, again, an experience of being in competition in front of people, and I
relished it.
MR. ROCAP: So you started doing things that you did as a lawyer early on in your life.
MR. HIBEY: Not knowing. Yes. Quite unknown.
MR. ROCAP: Interesting. Why don’t we talk about —
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MR. HIBEY: Well before you do, I have to do a definite shout out to a Xaverian brother
who really had a lot to do with my formation. When I went to high school, a
notice was put up that there would be an oratorical contest sponsored by the
Rotary Club, which is one of these fraternal organizations that does good in
the community. It was on citizenship of some sort. I say “some sort,” I can’t
remember the angle completely, but I’m sure it had to do with freedom and
the ability to do and grow in the United States democracy. So I responded to
the solicitation for the contest. Well, we did not have a rush to do this. I was
the only one who volunteered, and that put me together on a frequent basis
with Brother Oswin, CFX. That began a three-year relationship of my
competing in oratorical competitions.
MR. ROCAP: Did you do a debate or just speech?
MR. HIBEY: Just speech. I didn’t do debate until college, and I didn’t like it. But the
oratorical competitions were something I was very comfortable doing.
Brother Oswin helped me sharpen my technique. It was he who would
critique me and bring other people in to provide feedback. There was a
lawyer, and there was a high school teacher who voluntarily came and
listened to me when I was practicing so that they could critique me. The
concern Brother Oswin had was he had heard me so often that he was afraid
he was missing something, so I was constantly being sharpened by these
outside critics.
I can remember that I went to Le Moyne College one weekend during the
oratorical season to be observed and critiqued by Father John Curry, SJ. He
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was a Shakespeare scholar, a brilliant man. Father Curry wore a hearing aid.
Back in the 1950s, that was a plug and a wire, not concealed, it was just out
there and down to a battery. That’s what I observed. So we went into a
practice area at Le Moyne, and he sat there and watched me and listened to
me and nodded approvingly. Then he said, “Let’s do it again. I want to see
and hear it one more time.” I did. This is what you do in practice. But in the
middle of the speech, he reached up to his hearing aid and took it out of his
ear, and I fell apart. Brother Oswin said “What’s wrong?” I said, and not
pointing, but embarrassed to say out loud, “He just pulled his hearing aid out
of his ear. He can’t hear me.” The priest caught on and laughed about it and
said, “I was just trying to follow your gesticulations and how you managed
your hands during the speech, and so I just tuned out the voice.” Well that
really taught me a lot. First of all, how particular this person was, but also,
how observant he could be and how keenly I had to pay attention to things
like that, where my hands were and what part my hands played in delivering
the speech.
MR. ROCAP: So you had some pretty serious training in high school in terms of how to
present yourself, how to present arguments, and so on. Did anybody during
that time ever say hey, you ought to think about being a lawyer in high
school, or did that thought ever occur to you?
MR. HIBEY: The thought didn’t occur to me. I had never met a lawyer. The first lawyer I
ever met was one of these lawyers that Brother Oswin brought in to hear me,
and that was in my sophomore year of high school, a time when I was utterly
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clueless about a lot of things, including what I might do with myself when
the time came.
MR. ROCAP: Did you have any other particular interests in high school, or did you play
sports, working on the newsletter, or annual yearbook or anything like that?
MR. HIBEY: Sports, and I had an unusual experience. I was in two senior plays.
MR. ROCAP: When you say “senior plays,” you mean drama plays?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. The first one when I was a freshman at St. Francis, and the second one
was during my senior year. During my freshman year, the diocese of
Syracuse, in which we were jurisdictionally located, held a yearly oratorical
contest called the Catholic Student Mission Crusade Oratorical Contest, and
its award was a scholarship to Le Moyne College, not all expenses paid, but I
think it was around $1,000, which was a princely sum in those days toward
anybody’s tuition.
A senior, in my freshman year, went up to Syracuse and competed in what
we called the CSMC Oratoricals. Brother Oswin said to me that he wanted
me to go and observe the contest because he planned on my competing in it
starting in my sophomore year. So I went up with Billy Maher for his run at
the roses.
The contest began on a Friday, and then the judges would reduce the field to
three. Now we’re talking about a whole bunch of high schools all over the
diocese competing. So maybe fifteen or something like that. Billy made it to
the final three, which meant he had to be back in Syracuse on Sunday for the
finals. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the senior play at Saint Francis had a
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three-day run beginning on Friday night and ending on Sunday in the
afternoon, when Billy would be competing in the finals. Billy competed in
Syracuse, but there was a big problem. He was also in the senior play, had a
major role in it, but now would not be able to perform in it on Sunday
because it coincided with the very hour that the contest in Syracuse was
going to be held.
When I got home from the Friday competition, Brother Alan, the principal at
my high school called me at home, and he asked me what I was doing Friday
night. I said, “Well I was planning to go to the senior play. I want to see it.”
He said, “Good. At the end of the first act, I want you to meet me in the
cafeteria.” So, Friday evening I meet Brother Alan in the cafeteria, which
was off the auditorium, and he poses the problem involving Billy’s speech
and theatre conflict, which I’m learning about for the first time. And Brother
Alan said, “We need you to play Billy’s part on Sunday.” I said, yeah.
Brother Alan replied, “So here’s the script. You are [whoever it was in the
play].” I met the director, who was an outsider, and he said, “Come and see
me tomorrow – which would be Saturday – so we can take you through the
blocking and then you do it on Sunday. Can you handle that?” I said,
“Yeah, sure.” It’s great when you don’t know what the pitfalls are.
So I was in the senior play as a freshman. Billy was up in Syracuse
competing and won. The winnings, in addition to the scholarship, included
custody of a trophy that was obscenely large. It almost came up to my waist
when I was standing next to it.
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Now if your school wins the oratorical contest three times over a period of X
years, you get to retire this enormous trophy to your school, and that was a
big deal. So my sophomore year, I competed and won. Junior year, I
competed and won. Senior year, I competed. With Billy’s win and then my
next two, that was enough to retire the trophy. We got a start on the next one
in my senior year where we won, and after I left, I don’t think they retired it,
but they did win again at last once more.
That’s how I ended up with two plays in four years. But more importantly,
economically, I got a scholarship every year, so I ran a nice little total. I
have it in my head that the total scholarship I won was in excess of $3,000
that could be applied to my education at Le Moyne if I chose to go there.
MR. ROCAP: That’s extraordinary. Looking back on it with more years of wisdom that
you may not have had when you were a teenager, did all this come naturally,
your abilities to speak and perform as well in the high school play and all of
the speaking roles that you had, was that just natural to you?
MR. HIBEY: I didn’t take any lessons. At home, my mother was very particular about
appearance, enunciation, things that I think are necessary to present a
positive image of yourself in the public eye.
MR. ROCAP: That all certainly paid off.
MR. HIBEY: It did.
MR. ROCAP: During that time, we talked about Brother Oswin, but did you have any other
role models beyond your mother and father that had an impact on you?
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MR. HIBEY: I had the nuns. They cared. I had the Brothers. They were muscular about it
and let me know I had a place if I comported myself accordingly. Brother
Oswin I remember got sick in my junior year, and he had to leave to one of
the Brothers houses to be cared for. Brother Urban Francis came in and
helped me, but we had a problem. I was competing in the American Legion
Oratoricals also during the same season as I was competing in the Catholic
Student Mission Crusade Oratoricals, and I didn’t have the time to write a
new speech for the CSMC. The work that had to be done on the American
Legion was far more complicated. I had to study the Constitution. I had to
know its provisions. I had to be able to respond to a judge’s command to talk
about the Fourth Amendment or the Second Amendment and then do so
extemporaneously. So there was a lot of work. I was in the library a lot, so I
neglected to write a speech for the CSMC. We were of the opinion that a
good speech is worth repeating, and I did that and still won. But one of the
priests in Syracuse, Father Tom Costello, came up to me and said
congratulations, but don’t come back here next year with that same speech,
and I didn’t. I changed the subject entirely and went before the audience in
my senior year and happily won again.
Fast forward 25 years. I’m on the board of trustees at Le Moyne College, my
alma mater. I was getting ready for my first meeting, and I was putting
papers out on the spot where I was to be seated, and I hear a voice behind me,
and the voice says, “Long ago, I thought we fought a war, a cruel war and
settled the negro problem.” The subject was personal attitude and justice
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toward the negro, and that was my opening line, and now I’m hearing this
repeated to me 25 years later. Who the hell is this? I turn around. It is now
Bishop Tom Costello, who was also on the board, and he remembered that.
MR. ROCAP: Amazing.
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: We talked a little bit about the fact that you did play some sports in high
school. What were those sports, and how well did you do?
MR. HIBEY: I certainly did not make my mark in any sport, but I loved and to this day
love sports. I played baseball. I was an infielder, second base. Basketball, I
was tall enough to be a forward. No football because the school couldn’t
afford to field a football team. Golf became a defining sport for me because I
could play it for so much longer, and I did not need to have blinding speed or
sure hands and a high batting average or average fifteen points a game. So
golf became my sport and my passion. I played competitively within the
school league. I never did anything special, but I loved every minute of it.
MR. ROCAP: When did you start thinking about college and what, if anything, led you to
Le Moyne?
MR. HIBEY: It would be too much to say that I thought about college in any sustained
way. I presumed I’d go to college, and which college was never a matter of
concern to me, and I shut the door on thinking about any college other than
Le Moyne when I started to win those scholarships because I knew that that
meant we could “afford” to go to college with the help of these scholarships.
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I had no prior experience with the Jesuits at that time except for one Jesuit
who came on a recruiting trip to each of the high schools in the diocese. I’ll
tell you how and why I remember it. He was Father Cyril Schomer, a Jesuit
who was making the rounds to persuade people to go to Le Moyne, a new
Jesuit school in Syracuse, New York, founded in 1946. One of his selling
points was, “You go to Le Moyne, you’ll probably find the girl that you
marry.” I’m 16, and I was saying to myself, “What is he talking about? I’m
16 years old.”
The fun of this story is that Fr. Schomer also went to Cooperstown, New
York, where Mary Ellen, my wife, is from. Mary Ellen didn’t attend
LeMoyne, and we did not meet until I was in the Prettyman program several
years later, but she recalls when she was looking at colleges to attend being
told by Father Schomer that she would probably find the man that she
marries at Le Moyne. She did, but not according to the way he had it in
mind.
MR. ROCAP: Mary Ellen did not go to Le Moyne?
MR. HIBEY: She did not. She went to Marymount. Anyway, we’ve laughed about that
over the years. Father Schomer came also with his violin, and the Brothers
permitted us to meet in assembly to listen to Father Schomer, who, at some
point in his life, was the first violinist of the Minneapolis Symphony
Orchestra. He blew the doors off the place that morning by playing virtuoso
violin.
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I never gave serious thought to any other school, unlike my siblings who
thought Notre Dame was the be all and end all for them. So I’m very fond of
saying, still to their consternation, they chose to go to Notre Dame; my sister
and I chose to get an education.
MR. ROCAP: Well said. So, with respect to finances, you did say earlier that your family
was in a modest financial position. Did your parents help with the
educational finances?
MR. HIBEY: They took care of it all. They gave us ten degrees. There were scholarships
that I got, and I don’t know about the other three. I have a feeling my
brother, Joe, the scientist, got aid along the way, but I can’t remember
whether it was the GI bill or some separate kind of funding.
MR. ROCAP: Other than scholarships, your parents paid for education for all four children?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. There’s something very endearing about what my parents did. For all
the time that I was at Le Moyne, every ten days, dad came up and gave me
clean laundry and some Arabic food. This was the whole time I was in
college. He had work in Syracuse. He would therefore get my laundry done.
My grandmother made the Arabic food, and mom did to an extent, and I
would always have a care package, which was most welcome in my
dormitory.
MR. ROCAP: You started in the Fall of 1958 at Le Moyne, is that right?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Was Le Moyne co-ed at that time?
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MR. HIBEY: Yes. From the beginning. The bishop made a deal with the Jesuits. The deal
was I’ll give you 113 choice acres that the diocese owns in Syracuse, or just
on the border of Syracuse and a town called Fayetteville. You establish a
college there, but you have to admit women. Jesuits wanted that completely.
MR. ROCAP: You had separate dorms at that point in time for men and women?
MR. HIBEY: Well, we had a dorm for men on campus. The women lived off campus in
homes and one strip mall-type of arrangement behind the property.
Interestingly, one of the girls lived in a home that made itself available to
house students, and it turns out that she lived with Father Ted Hesburgh’s
[the President of Notre Dame] mother, and every Sunday, he would dutifully
call to check in on his mom, and she would report and then say would you
like to talk to Kathleen. So throughout her time at Le Moyne, she would say
hello to Father Hesburgh every Sunday.
MR. ROCAP: Interesting. So how many dorms were there on campus?
MR. HIBEY: When I was there, one.
MR. ROCAP: Just one. I assume there was a chapel in the dorm?
MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: At Notre Dame there was a saying, “a chapel in every dorm.”
MR. HIBEY: We had a single chapel in the administration building. It was very small. If
we had a mass for the entire student body, it would be in the auditorium.
Things have changed. We’ve got now a full quadrangle and a beautiful freestanding
chapel.
MR. ROCAP: How many students were at Le Moyne when you were there, approximately?
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MR. HIBEY: Seven hundred. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s probably around 2,000.
MR. ROCAP: Did the housing arrangements for the young women ever become an issue
while you were there?
MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: Did it ever become an issue later?
MR. HIBEY: Do you mean as a moral issue?
MR. ROCAP: Not as a moral issue, but as an equal education issue.
MR. HIBEY: No. Because the Jesuits were committed to that, and no one could interpret
what they were doing up there otherwise.
MR. ROCAP: Good. So what was your general course curriculum? Did you pick out a
major early on, and what was it?
MR. HIBEY: I picked out a major and minor timely. I majored in political science,
international relations. I minored in philosophy and classical languages.
Philosophy was a mandatory minor in Jesuit schools at the time.
MR. ROCAP: Why did you pick those? Do you remember?
MR. HIBEY: I wanted to stay as far away from science as possible.
MR. ROCAP: Had the idea of a career in the law popped into your mind yet?
MR. HIBEY: I had only met one lawyer, so no.
MR. ROCAP: Are there any of your college classmates that were particularly notable, either
just became well-known later or who you became very close friends with and
maintained friendship with over the years?
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MR. HIBEY: My closest friend, Mike Curtin, was my college roommate. He is a very
distinguished member of the bar here. He majored in industrial relations, but
his specialty in the law is trusts and estates. We remain close.
MR. ROCAP: Did you room with him all four years?
MR. HIBEY: No. We were roommates in our freshman year. He then had different living
arrangements until our senior year when he became a prefect and had his
expenses paid, and one of the people he had to check in at night, because we
had dormitory check-in, was me. So you can imagine what kind of exchange
we had every night when he came to see that I was in my room at a time
when I should be. We were very close. He married a Le Moyne girl who
was a classmate of ours.
MR. ROCAP: Did you in interacting with him during those years start talking about
becoming lawyers?
MR. HIBEY: No. Because I have been required, if you will, to reflect back on all these
experiences, I am surprised at how little time I spent in decision making at
Le Moyne to go to Le Moyne or to go to law school. As a matter of fact, the
only principle I thought I had with respect to law school was I couldn’t cut it.
I was a horrible standardized test taker. I never went to whatever they call it,
bar review school or however they describe those programs. Never did. I
went in cold, and the results reflected it.
MR. ROCAP: For your LSATs?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. I had no idea what it was about. I gave it no thought. I just knew that I
had to show up one morning and take this test. If that were the only
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determinant, there’s no way I’d be a lawyer today. That was a very
interesting time through my legal education. I had my heroes who were
people who urged me to go on at a time when I had no business to do so.
In those days, some of the Catholic law schools used to ride circuit, if you
will, amongst the Catholic colleges recruiting people. I had the most unusual
recruitment for someone of my test-taking accomplishments. Strike
accomplishments. I was interviewed by Ken Pye, the Associate Dean of
Georgetown, who turned out to be one of the most important persons in my
life. I was interviewed by Father Drinan when he was the Dean at Boston
College, and on the basis of recommendations from Le Moyne, offered me a
full scholarship. I was interviewed by the Dean of Villanova Law School.
MR. ROCAP: It sounds like it was a different world in terms of applying to law schools
than it is now.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. This was people relying on Le Moyne having a record of placing its
graduates who, for the most part, came from modest backgrounds but who
were willing to work. I certainly filled that space well and benefited from
Le Moyne’s reputation in that regard.
Of those schools, I wanted to go to Georgetown because it was in
Washington, D.C., the seat of government, and that had a terrific attraction
for me. Ken Pye was one of the most brilliant people I have ever known, and
I know that my classmates in law school feel the same way. I still have a
vivid memory about one civil procedure lecture he gave. After it was over, it
was a two-hour class, the class stood up and gave him an ovation. I found
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out later that he was brilliant, and the legal profession knew it and relied on
him heavily.
MR. ROCAP: Let’s go back to Le Moyne a little bit. Did you continue your speaking
activities like you did in high school?
MR. HIBEY: There was only one oratorical contest that I could find. It was an
international law sponsored oratorical contest. I competed in it. I think what
was most notable was I found it, and I had to apply for it, rather than one of
my teachers saying this is one for you. But I competed for it, and ended up
in Buffalo, New York, to speak. I think I remember the food poisoning more
than I do the contest, but I was healthy enough to win it. That was it. The
only other opportunity to do any kind of speaking was in debate, something I
had never done. I did it. I didn’t like it, so I didn’t do it anymore.
MR. ROCAP: Was there a difference in your mind between the debate experience that you
had in college and being in a trial?
MR. HIBEY: I always thought that the debating experience in college was an exercise in
sophistry. Happily, I didn’t feel that way about courtroom work.
MR. ROCAP: Courtroom work being a little bit more real.
MR. HIBEY: It was. It’s evidence-based, if you will.
MR. ROCAP: It was not so much the back-and-forth of debate as it was the subject matter
that you were asked to debate about, is that fair?
MR. HIBEY: I did not like the mechanics of debate because it was premised on who could
turn a phrase better than the other guy. Instinctively, I knew that cannot be
the way things go.
21
MR. ROCAP: Were there any other clubs of any kind that you joined at Le Moyne?
MR. HIBEY: I was in some honor societies for classics and the Jesuit honor society. I have
no great memory of clubs.
MR. ROCAP: You mentioned earlier that you had gone back to Le Moyne and you were on
the board for how many years?
MR. HIBEY: That’s a good question. I think about six.
MR. ROCAP: When was that?
MR. HIBEY: I don’t know. It was during the presidency of Father Robert Mitchell, SJ,
one of the great men in my life.
MR. ROCAP: During the time that you were there at Le Moyne, aside from your roommate
Mike Curtin, were there any professors who were particularly important in
your life and your forward thinking?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. Daniel Berrigan.
MR. ROCAP: Was he a priest at that time?
MR. HIBEY: He was up until he died in 2016. He was always a Jesuit.
MR. ROCAP: What was your relationship with Father Berrigan?
MR. HIBEY: He was a theology professor of mine. I had no special relationship with him,
as did so many others, so many others, but he was so clear and his lectures
were out of this world.
MR. ROCAP: Eventually he and his brother Philip Berrigan became famous nationally.
Was any of that on display? Were you influenced by any of that at the time
when you were at Le Moyne?
22
MR. HIBEY: Yes. At the time, it was a matter of race relations, nothing else that I can
really think of. So yes, social justice was extremely important, and the lens
through which we saw this focused a great deal on the black community.
MR. ROCAP: Why don’t we move to law school. We talked a little bit about your being
recruited for law school, and you ultimately decided to go to Georgetown?
MR. HIBEY: I got wait-listed, and it was only later in the summer that I got the word. I
went to law school.
MR. ROCAP: Were your parents supportive of your decision?
MR. HIBEY: Oh yes.
MR. ROCAP: I think I know the answer to this, but there had been no attorneys in the
Hibey family before, is that right?
MR. HIBEY: Correct.
MR. ROCAP: So you were going to be the first.
MR. HIBEY: Yep.
MR. ROCAP: At the time that you finally decided you were going to go to law school, had
you met any other lawyers besides the ones who had critiqued your high
school speech performances?
MR. HIBEY: Well, there was a lawyer on the faculty at Le Moyne who was also part of
this incredible dynamic that resulted in my going to law school. He was the
faculty advisor for those who aspired to go to law school. Ed Conan. Ed
Conan taught business-oriented courses at Le Moyne. I never took any of
those. I was firmly rooted in the before-Christ era. He is the one who had
the communication with the recruiters who came and chatted me up to them.
23
He was also the U.S. Commissioner. Today they call them the U.S.
magistrate for the district. A very smart guy. Assertive, but in a charming
kind of way. I think he had a lot to do with orienting these people to me.
MR. ROCAP: I’m curious. I’m seeing you in college at this point. You don’t know any
lawyers, haven’t had hardly any experience with lawyers, your major and
minors are liberal arts but not liberal arts classes that you would expect to be
on a path to law school, at least in my mind, but what was their pitch to you
that got you to say gee, this is the direction I want to go.
MR. HIBEY: I don’t think I ever thought that. It was a matter of survival. Whether I could
do this kind of thing, I admit that whenever I imagined law school, I
imagined beyond law school to the courtroom. Why? Because I had
developed skills in public speaking that I knew would be useful, but having
substantive appreciation for law school, the dignity of contracts, the rights of
arrestees, I’m afraid I hadn’t signed up for any of that. Not because I
rejected it. It just wasn’t on the rialto.
MR. ROCAP: Were there any other professions or areas of business that you ever
considered entering?
MR. HIBEY: For a brief time, the priesthood.
MR. ROCAP: But that came and went, and you decided to go to law school?
MR. HIBEY: It was while I was in law school.
MR. ROCAP: I was going to mention that you’re talking to somebody who was a theology
major at Notre Dame and who ended up as a lawyer [laughter].
MR. HIBEY: That’s great. They gave us 12 hours of theology, 24 hours of philosophy.
24
MR. ROCAP: Those are all good tools. I’d be interested in your view, I’m not going to tell
you my view, but your view of how those kinds of classes and those
educational tools have formed how you’ve approached the law.
MR. HIBEY: They had a lot to do with preparation and execution of questioning witnesses.
I’ll tell you, and we’ll talk about editing later. I developed my own
epistemology of what constituted evidence, and it was straight out of my
Thomistic thinking. I didn’t pick that up anywhere other than college.
MR. ROCAP: Interesting.
MR. HIBEY: I don’t know if I’ll remember by the time we get to it, but my course, the one
I executed for thirteen years, or presented, for thirteen years, embodies whole
sections of my thinking that would derive from my studies in philosophy.
MR. ROCAP: Let’s go to Georgetown again. So you enter Georgetown in the Fall of 1962,
I believe?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: That was in the old building on E Street. Could you describe the physical
nature of the building at that point in time? It’s not on the hill of
Georgetown, right?
MR. HIBEY: No. But it was next door to the courts, and by that time, I had enough
information to confirm that I wanted to be a trial lawyer, and it was
wonderful that the courts were across the street from the law school, but they
were also across the street from where I lived because I lived where the law
school was. There were three rowhouses that were part of the law school
complex, and I use that term advisably. By sheer coincidence, years later
25
Mary Ellen’s first office was in the same building I used to live in when she
was with the Offender Rehabilitation Project. The building dated back to the
1920s. It might have been even older than that. It served its purpose. It had
a large library. There were offices for the administration and then on the
next floor, there were classrooms. So it was all quite self-contained.
MR. ROCAP: Who was the dean at that time?
MR. HIBEY: Paul R. Dean.
MR. ROCAP: How many students were there?
MR. HIBEY: That’s a good question. The reason why I’m hesitating is because I don’t
think I can give you an honest estimate. We had the day division and the
night division, and they were both quite large. I think at the time that I
studied there, we were the fourth largest law school in the country.
MR. ROCAP: You were in the day division?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Did you have any kind of a job when you were in law school?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. Ken Pye made me his research assistant, and I performed that function,
which was as invaluable as the classroom education for the entire time I was
there. I wrote research memos, because he remained active in the community
and in the profession, drafts of pleadings, where he had been appointed to
make an argument in the Supreme Court and other appellate courts. I helped
compile a casebook in criminal procedure.
MR. ROCAP: So that would have taken a fair amount of your time in addition to your
studies.
26
MR. HIBEY: Oh yes.
MR. ROCAP: Was your law school experience the same as most of the rest of us, which is a
little bit crazy, a little bit intense?
MR. HIBEY: It was intense because to me it was a fight for survival, and I understood that
I had been given every opportunity not to fail, and I was going to make sure
that I didn’t. What happened after that happens.
MR. ROCAP: When you say it was a fight for survival, you mean from an academic
standpoint?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Was this different than college? Were you concerned about academics in
college at all?
MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: What made law school different?
MR. HIBEY: It was a whole new way of thinking. I thought about this a bit. I reached a
point where in my second semester of my second year in law school, I began
to stutter when talking about the law, and I didn’t panic. I’m saying to
myself basically what the hell is going on. I decided that what was going on
was my brain was recalibrating to think in a way that it had never done
before knowingly. Once I figured that out, I wasn’t panicked. I knew that I
simply couldn’t let up, and I didn’t.
MR. ROCAP: Were there clinics available to you at Georgetown at that time?
27
MR. HIBEY: I think they were in formation in my last year. I wasn’t in any of them
because none of them struck my interest, plus I was working my tail off with
the studies and for Ken.
MR. ROCAP: Did you have the opportunity to walk across the street and watch trials? Did
you take advantage of that?
MR. HIBEY: I did it every week almost, on Fridays because I learned that that was
motions day for most of the judges, and so I could go in and hear a whole
bunch of cases rather than get stuck with one. I always had the freedom to
go and watch a trial, and I did that from time to time. But Fridays for a
couple of hours according to my schedule, I would spend in the court’s
motions practice. My favorite personality in all of that was Alexander
Holtzoff.
MR. ROCAP: Would you call him an efficient judge?
MR. HIBEY: Oh yes. Did you ever see him operate? It was amazing. First of all, he was
very short, and he wore those pince-nez glasses so they were on his nose.
His law clerk would sit in the jury box, and they’d call the case, lawyers
would get up, and he would listen to their arguments. These guys, the oldtimers,
knew that they had a formidable man up there. So the arguments
were well-tailored, for the most part. Well-constructed. He would then write
a little on a sheet of paper and he’d hold it out, and the clerk would run from
the jury box to the bench, get the note or the paper, and then rush out of the
courtroom, come back a few minutes later with maybe six or seven law
reporters, and they were open to the pages he wanted. He’d listen to their
28
arguments, and then he was ready to rule. When he started his ruling, you
could hardly see his face because the books were piled so high in front of
him, and then he started, and he would give his opinion from the bench with
citations. I didn’t understand how great a move that was. That’s what he
would do. And as he did, he would take a book and move it. He would
quote from it and put it off to the side so that by the time you could see him
fully again, he had ruled. I just thought that was magical. I learned later how
difficult that is.
MR. ROCAP: Just for the physical setting, the courthouse that you’re talking about is the
Barrett Prettyman courthouse, and this was, and still is, the United States
district court as opposed to the superior court that was created later.
MR. HIBEY: That is correct.
MR. ROCAP: There was a municipal court, I believe.
MR. HIBEY: It was called a court of general sessions. I had surprisingly little experience
there because all twenty-two D.C. Code offenses. If they were felonies, they
were in district court, so I ended up trying a whole bunch of cases in the
federal court, even though long after I was gone, well, not long, but after I
was gone, those cases would be tried in the superior court.
MR. ROCAP: You’re in law school. You know you want to be a trial lawyer at this point.
You are visiting whenever you can the motions day over in the district court
in the Prettyman courthouse, and then are you going back and talking with
Associate Dean Pye about what it’s like to be a litigator or should I do this,
or should I do something else, discussions like that?
29
MR. HIBEY: No. He didn’t try to sway me one way or the other. I think he knew that I
was not a born appellate lawyer, which he was. The word was that when he
was in the Army as a judge advocate general, in the courthouse on the corner
of 5th and E, and it was a new court, the U.S. Court of Military Appeals, I
think it was called, he had memorized all of the orders of the court from its
beginning until the day he was up there arguing those cases. An absolute
genius.
MR. ROCAP: At some point, you hear about the Prettyman fellowship program?
MR. HIBEY: No.
MR. ROCAP: Did somebody come looking for you?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Ah. So how did that happen?
MR. HIBEY: Ken stopped me in the hallway one day at the law school and said I want you
to go over and see Bill Greenhalgh because you’re going to receive a
Prettyman Fellowship.
MR. ROCAP: Had you heard the words Prettyman Fellowship before then?
MR. HIBEY: Not really. But I knew it was a next step. Fellowships struck me as a
graduate degree. It turned out that it was, but it was so much more. Shortly
after, I would say within a few hours of that, I walked out of the law school
to go to the Prettyman offices to see Bill Greenhalgh, and I encountered him
on the street as I was going to see him. I knew him because he was offering
a course in criminal procedure and maybe just on the Fourth Amendment. I
can’t remember. He got ahold of me, and he said, “I hear you’re going to be
30
in the Prettyman program.” He’s very gruff. Heart of gold, but gruff. I said,
“Yes, sir.” He said, “Just don’t screw up.” I said, “I don’t intend to do that.”
And that was it.
There’s one other little thing that makes me laugh every time I think about it.
I was profiled in a magazine associated with Georgetown Law Center, I think
at a time when it was safe to admit that I was going to be okay as a lawyer.
They interviewed Bill Greenhalgh. The only adjective he could come up
with to describe me as a student was “typical.” I’ve laughed about that for
years.
MR. ROCAP: So we know, this is an article, a profile, “A transformation of a typical
Georgetown law student Richard Hibey, L 65.” We can look at this and
maybe come back to it later.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. But the word “typical.” That’s as hard as they’ve worked to come up
with to describe me because I was not one of the stars.
MR. ROCAP: It says, “In 1965, Richard Hibey was a typical student in the middle of his
class, recalls Georgetown Law Professor William Greenhalgh. He had yet to
find his calling in life. The day Hibey entered the Prettyman Fellowship
program, that all changed.” That’s the opening paragraph of the article.
MR. HIBEY: That’s about right. I still get a kick out of his use of the word “typical.”
Usually it’s more descriptive than that. He had to work hard at that one.
MR. ROCAP: He was direct. So, I believe that Judge Hogan was a classmate of yours?
MR. HIBEY: Tom was a classmate, but the problem I’m having was whether he was in the
day school or the night school because I seem to remember that he split his
31
time. I knew him, and, of course when we really intersected was in the
courthouse when he was a clerk to Judge Jones. So the answer is yes. He
and I were classmates in the sense of being contemporaries.
John Dean was a classmate, and he was in what we call A to K.
MR. ROCAP: Which means?
MR. HIBEY: The classes were divided between people with last names A to K, and then
there was L to Z.
MR. ROCAP: I see. So the version of sections was by alphabet at that time.
MR. HIBEY: Yes. For the core curriculum. Contracts.
MR. ROCAP: I take it that during law school, contracts and those kinds of things were
probably not your most favorite subject, or did you like them all?
MR. HIBEY: I didn’t. I didn’t like them at all. I had particular interest in criminal law
right from the beginning.
There’s another anomaly that I’ve never been able to account for. I can only
smile at it. I got the book in Agency. Do you know what that means?
MR. ROCAP: No. I don’t.
MR. HIBEY: In my day, they would give a Hornbook in a particular subject to the student
with the highest grade in the course. Well, it was such a shock, apparently,
to the professor that I would get the book in Agency, a two-hour course, that
he went behind the identifying number, because you’re not supposed to know
whose paper, and he came to me, didn’t tell me that I got the book. The
exams were over, and the markings were going on. There were lots of papers
to consider by the professors. He came into the library where I had happened
32
to be doing something for Ken, and he said to me, “Let me ask you a
question. What did you think of the exam in Agency?” I looked at him. I
was clueless. So I said, “I thought it was a fair exam.” And I did. I thought
it was fair. I got through it timely. I didn’t strain. I can remember the
experience because the others were sometimes treacherous. He goes, “I was
just wondering,” and he walked away. And then a couple weeks later, I got
the book. I don’t know how that happened.
MR. ROCAP: Did you take a course from Professor Greenhalgh?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Was that his Criminal Procedure course?
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: Putting aside Dean Pye, of the professors that you had, were there ones that
were particularly important to you in your development?
MR. HIBEY: Phil Ryan. Philip Ryan taught Equity, and he taught Tax too. I did not stand
out in the Equity course at all, but I hung on his every word. He was that
clear. So I looked at the list of courses that he offered, and I had no business
taking Tax, truly no business, but I had to take Tax because I thought he was
so clear, so well-worded, that it could only help me if I could get through the
course, and I did. And I got what was for me a decent grade.
MR. ROCAP: Interesting. And Tax too which is about as far away from litigation as you
can get I suppose.
So let’s talk about Prettyman. In that article that we quoted from before, Bill
Greenhalgh says that your trajectory changed the day you joined the
33
Prettyman program, from being typical to being something un-typical, I
guess. I’m not sure what word he would use.
MR. HIBEY: Survivor, but he was stuck with “typical.”
MR. ROCAP: What is your view of that change, as you think back on it, that change in your
life when you go from law school to the Prettyman Fellowship?
MR. HIBEY: I was getting closer to what was becoming a realizable dream, that I could
actually try a case.
MR. ROCAP: How long had that been a dream for you?
MR. HIBEY: It was in my mind during all those Fridays in the courthouse.
MR. ROCAP: Many people, myself included, early in their career would get very nervous
about having to try a case. Any nerves that you ever had?
MR. HIBEY: I bought into the excitement of it all. I don’t want you to think I’m
impervious to being nervous, but I had the ability to translate that into
excitement. That required things of me, like being prepared. I kept thinking
if I was prepared, I could beat anybody.
MR. ROCAP: We’re going to talk about some stories of your experiences in the Prettyman
program in a minute, but there was one story that you relayed to me at the
beginning of the Prettyman Fellowship and everyone taking the bar that I
thought was a particularly important one for people to hear.
MR. HIBEY: Bar results, in those days anyway, came out in the newspapers somewhere
around Thanksgiving. We had been doing intensive study in Criminal law in
preparation for the day we could get our own cases assigned to us by the
court. The lead-up to that was intensive study of about a thousand cases. We
34
were expected to know them. So we really were deeply immersed in
criminal jurisprudence. Finally, a couple of the guys went in to see Bill
Greenhalgh. We called him Chief. The guys said, “Chief, we took the bar
exam a couple months ago and we want to get going. Can’t you find out
from the bar examiners what our results are?” We asked because we knew
he knew people. Finally, he said he would think about it or talk to somebody
about it. A few days later, he’s in his office, which is about the size of this
room, and he sends for us. So we walk in, and we line the room.
MR. ROCAP: So there were about ten or eleven Prettyman fellows?
MR. HIBEY: I don’t know how many, but I think there were ten of us. We all lined up as
if we were going to get shot, and he said to us, I called so-and-so, and I asked
him if he could turn over the results. And then he says one of you did not
make it. I was sure it was yours truly, and the other guys, for lesser reasons,
thought it was one of them. Then he said – and I’m making up a name here –
Glen, I’m sorry, but you didn’t. We were heartsick. We couldn’t be joyous
for our own causes, and we felt so badly, so there was no great celebration,
no drinking, no nothing.
We resolved in that room to take extra cases and give them to him to work up
as if they were his own, and in fact, they were his own, so that he had a case
load even as he was waiting for the second bar result, which came in, I want
to say early July. You took the thing in February and got the results early
June or July. That’s what we did.
35
And here’s the payoff. Of the ten of us, this guy tried more cases than we did
during that period because his cases didn’t fold for pleas and stuff like that,
so we had a happy ending.
MR. ROCAP: It sounds to me like there was a fair amount of camaraderie rather than
competition.
MR. HIBEY: There was never competition. None.
MR. ROCAP: Let’s talk a little bit about some of your experiences in the Prettyman
program. After you passed the bar, and with those thousand cases under your
belt and in your mind, you then began working up cases, and you were a
defense lawyer, I assume.
MR. HIBEY: We were defense lawyers. We went to court every morning and would go up
to the clerk and say we’re here.
MR. ROCAP: This is in the district court?
MR. HIBEY: No. General Sessions. We’re here. They’d say take a seat and the court will
get to you. We would sit through an arraignment. The defendant’s name
was called. He came out from the cell block behind the court, which one
judge called “the lounge,” and then the assignment court judge would call the
name of a lawyer off the list. You would register for the day. That lawyer
got paired up with the defendant, and they would leave back into the cell
block, talk, formulate a position, come back out and say we enter a plea of
not guilty, respectfully, and make a jury demand. The court would give you
a date, and you’d go off. Pretty simple, very basic. That’s how we got our
first cases.
36
MR. ROCAP: Were these misdemeanor cases? Any felonies?
MR. HIBEY: Yes. They were felonies and misdemeanors.
MR. ROCAP: If they were felonies, though, they would end up in district court?
MR. HIBEY: No. At this point, this was still under the old regime, before court reform.
So whatever it was, we were there, and the only way it wasn’t, was if it were
a U.S. code offense as opposed to a D.C. code offense. That took another
track. So that’s how we got our assignments.
MR. ROCAP: As a Prettyman fellow, did you have cases in district court?
MR. HIBEY: Oh yes. I think we all pulled at least one case and we argued appeals in the
circuit.
MR. ROCAP: We’ve talked a little bit before today about some of the experiences that you
had in the district court while you were a Prettyman fellow, and I’m going to
ask you about three or four of them, and maybe you could just elaborate a
little bit on the experience and the people that you intersected with and so on.
There was one case I believe that had been remanded for further proceedings,
and then you made a motion for a new trial. Maybe you could talk a little bit
about that case, who the judge was, what happened, and so on.
MR. HIBEY: By virtue of our membership in the bar and admission to the court of appeals
for the District of Columbia circuit, we would each catch one appeal, and I
got one. It had to do with the retroactive effect of Jackson v. Denno, having
to do with coerced confessions. I made an argument in the court of appeals
based upon a brief I had written and then argued, and don’t you know, a few
weeks later, the court of appeals reversed and remanded the case to the
37
district court for the hearing on the admissibility of a confession that I
claimed had been coerced. So the case goes back on remand, and it’s before
Judge William B. Bryant, one of the great men of our time. It was set for
argument on Friday, and my opponent turned out to be one of the most
legendary prosecutors in the history of the federal court in the District of
Columbia, Harold Titus. This was on a Friday morning. I put the client on
the stand, and he was cross-examined, and I got taken to school. This was an
awesome cross-examination. Then I had to argue the case based upon the
record. And I still felt I was right, so I passionately argued the particulars of
my position. After two hours of examining me by the judge, he said I think
I’ve heard enough, and your motion is denied. I was heartsick. So I went
back to the counsel table, and I pulled out the books that I brought with me
and filled the litigation bags, and with my head hung very low, I left. I went
over to my office. I was really just dejected. I was called by a very close
friend of mine, a classmate from Georgetown who was later in my wedding,
by the way, and I said I’m just sick. He said you need a change. He said
let’s go play golf. So we did. While I was gone, I still can’t believe this,
Judge Bryant, on his lunch hour, walked over to my offices looking for me
and telling our secretary, who, by coincidence, had one time been his
secretary, that I shouldn’t feel badly, that I did all I could do for the client,
that there are going to be times when you’re going to lose, and you’re just
going to have to suck it up, but he wanted me to know that I had nothing to
be ashamed of.
38
MR. ROCAP: That’s a remarkable, wonderful Judge Bryant story. There are many of them.
MR. HIBEY: I could tell you one other one. When I was a prosecutor.
MR. ROCAP: Let’s hold that until we get to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
MR. HIBEY: Yes.
MR. ROCAP: There was a story about Mr. Tinny?
MR. HIBEY: Wonderful Mr. Tinny. He was a Fifth Street regular who everybody, I
learned later, in the U.S. Attorney’s Office highly respected. He was nononsense,
pleasant, very honest, and just someone that as a prosecutor, you
could trust. He isn’t going to try to be shady.
Judge Chuck Halleck was on the bench in the court of general sessions, and
he was fed up with the Fifth Street bar. He did not think that defendants
were getting the kind of service they deserved. This was one of Chuck’s
early rants. So he got ahold of Paul McArdle, later a judge on that court, but
at this time, a senior member at Covington and president of the bar, and he
told McArdle to round up all the white shoe, ivy league, pin-striped, red-tie
young lawyers in the law firms uptown and get them down here because
they’re going to get appointed to criminal cases where they will be expected
to perform the highest standard of defense. And he did. And all these guys
came in one day. They didn’t know criminal law from anything. They were
all in civil practice. So their eyes were wide open as the proceedings of the
assignment court were underway. As a symbol of the judge’s serious intent,
he appointed Paul McArdle to the first case. The case comes up. It’s a lady
who was charged with ABC violations, Alcohol Beverage Control. What did
39
she do? She sold beer out of her kitchen without a license, and they charged
her. So he calls Paul McCardle. Paul takes the client, goes back to the
cellblock. In due course, comes back out and says that she doesn’t want my
services, so I’m moving to withdraw. Halleck was blown away by that. He
said why, and he said the client tells me she has a lawyer. Who is it?
William J. Tinny. Tinny, as I told you, is a very respected guy. The judge
just kind of threw back his head in frustration and said send for Mr. Tinny.
So they find him in the courthouse. That’s no surprise because that’s their
office, so to speak, for a lot of these guys. They find Mr. Tinny. He comes
into the courtroom, walks up, takes the case, comes back a few minutes later.
“We plead not guilty and request a trial date.” I didn’t think he could even
get a jury. He did. Then he addressed the question of bond, and the lady is
immediately released on recognizance, and out the door he goes with his
client. Somewhere between the door and the elevator, somebody says to
him, “Do you realize this lady turned down the services of a senior lawyer at
Covington for your services? How did that happen?” And Tinny turned to
him and said, “When you’re looking for a fixer and an adjuster, you don’t go
calling for a Phi Beta Kappa.”
MR. ROCAP: Wonderful story. Why don’t we finish here for the afternoon, and we’ll
reconvene at the next appropriate date.