| Bar Bulletin |
July,
2003 |
| MSBA News |
|
What Would Thurgood do?
~Cochran Urges Attorneys to Make A
Difference~
By Patrick Tandy
“I’m often asked,
as a trial lawyer, ‘Why do you practice law?’” attorney Johnnie L.
Cochran, Jr., posited to a crowd of more than 400 people on June 13 at the
MSBA Annual Meeting in Ocean City. “‘Why do you do what you do?’”
As an answer,
Cochran invoked the words Baltimore scribe H.L. Mencken used to explain
his own journalistic code. “Succinctly put,” Cochran said, “I say that I
try to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” And in his
45-minute speech – punctuated by powerful applause – the Solo Day guest
speaker illustrated just what he meant by that through highlights of his
legal career as outlined in his autobiography A Lawyer’s Life,
which he autographed both before and after the presentation.
“I knew I wanted to
be a lawyer when I was 11 years of age,” Cochran said of his days growing
up in California. “I didn’t really know much about what lawyers did, but I
knew that I liked to convince, to persuade and to advocate. And I
convinced my mother, who wanted me to be a doctor, that I should be a
lawyer. So I always say I guess I won my first case.”
Cochran described
his boyhood idol Thurgood Marshall as “someone who used the law to change
society for the better,” citing Marshall’s 1954 victory in Brown v. the
Board of Education which paved the way for desegregation in the
schools. “From the very beginning I always felt that’s what I wanted to
do. If I saw a problem I wanted to at least try to address that problem,
not only from the standpoint of the individual case but in a larger
context, what it meant to other citizens – and especially those who were
disenfranchised, to stand up and speak out for those who cannot speak for
themselves. And that’s a very unique calling.”
Cochran discussed a
number of cases through which he has attempted to make a difference in
society. For example, when his investigations into the deaths of several
young men following routine encounters with the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) in the early 1980s found the victims had died as the
result of chokeholds that they had been placed in, the use of the
chokehold by the LAPD was subsequently banned in all but life-threatening
situations.
“I have a lot of
faith in our system, and I have a lot of faith in police officers,
generally,” Cochran said. “But the police are just like everyone else -
there are good police officers and bad police officers, [and] my eye was
always on being and practicing in the civil arena of change.”
And Cochran has
been omnipresent in the civil arena. He cited the case of Cynthia Wiggins,
a Buffalo, New York, teenager who in 1995 was struck and killed by a dump
truck as she crossed a seven-lane highway on her way to her job in a
shopping mall food court, which shone an ill light on the mall’s practice
of excluding bus lines from the city’s poorer neighborhoods, including
Wiggins’s, from stopping on the mall’s property, while simultaneously
welcoming charter buses. Not only was a financial settlement benefiting
Wiggins’s young son reached, but the publicity generated by Cochran’s
involvement in no small part led to the mall changing its policy with
regard to the bus lines.
“Life isn’t about
money,” Cochran noted. “Money is not going to make you happy. You have to
do what you think is right under the circumstances.”
Cochran made little
mention of the O.J. Simpson case, which brought him into the national
spotlight in the mid-‘90s as head of the football star’s criminal defense
team, opting instead to focus on the role he believes lawyers should play
in society, and the often-hard road of the Good Fight.
“It’s not always
popular to stand up and speak out for what you believe to be true,”
Cochran said. “It’s about trying to earn respect and doing the right
thing, because this is not some dress rehearsal. So all of you remember
this as you go back to your offices – you’re here to try to make things
better, and [you’re] the arbiters for change. I appreciate the fact that
I’m here because others paid a significant price. I could waste my time,
or I could try to make a difference.
“You can do
cutting-edge things that may not always be popular, but they’ll make a
difference in this great country and change America. That’s what Thurgood
did back in the beginning, isn’t it? So if he did that, why can’t you do
that in your communities, wherever you are? It’s not just passing through
here. It’s trying to make a difference. You make a difference, you make it
better for everyone because there but for the grace of God go you and I.”
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