Man of the year
Two years out of law school, Norman Minor joined the
Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office. He
was unlike any other prosecutor who had come before him.
He was black.
Minor handled more than 5,000 felony prosecutions in his 18 years
with the office, winning 13 first-degree murder convictions, then entered
private practice and became a defense lawyer in 1948. He and other black lawyers of the time, and
others to come soon after - John W. Martin, Floyd Oliver, J. B. White, James
Willis, and the Stokes brothers, Carl and Louis -- gained fame as among the
best criminal attorneys to be found anywhere.
(Louis Stokes was the lead attorney before the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio.) They also mentored young black lawyers, and brought
them into their firms. One of those
young lawyers was John Carson.
Every year, the Cuyahoga Criminal Defense Lawyers
Association holds a banquet where it hands out its lifetime achievement award. Carson was the honoree this year, his 49th
year of practice. These functions follow
a familiar pattern: after consuming a
dinner of rubbery chicken and oversteamed vegetables, everybody sits around the
tables while some close friends of the honoree get up and tell stories about
him, and then he -- I can't remember a woman ever winning the award -- comes to
the podium, regales us with a war story or two, then thanks us. Usually, the speeches are short; sometimes not. I had some trepidation when I learned that
there would be about a dozen people speaking on Carson's behalf.
It turned out to be a fascinating evening, on two
accounts. First, we heard from several of
the "old-timers," lawyers who were trying criminal cases back in the 50's and
60's. That was a far different
time. You didn't have DNA and crime labs
and blood splatter experts and all this other CSI stuff. You didn't have open discovery, or even
closed discovery. As one put it, "We
lied to the prosecutors, and they lied to us."
The State had its witnesses, and maybe you had some, or maybe your case
just depended upon trashing theirs, but both sides walked into court with their
skinny files, and it was a knife fight.
Criminal lawyers can be a rowdy lot, often with outsize
personalities, and what I found most interesting about Carson is that he doesn't
fit that mold. You see him all the time
at the Justice Center, and he carries himself with such a quiet dignity and
reserve that you'd figure he was the partner at some firm doing corporate and
tax law. And that was the second
fascinating aspect of the evening: what
came through, from speaker after speaker, was the unflinching respect every
person in that room had for Carson. The
incoming president of CCDLA, who introduced the speakers, confessed that it
wasn't until this event that he learned Carson's first name was John;
everybody, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers alike, simply knew him as Mr.
Carson.
There are a number of rewards to being a lawyer. It makes your momma proud, and despite our
reputation, if you're introduced to someone at a party and they ask what you do
and you tell them you're a lawyer, they're a bit impressed. We are a profession, after all. The money's decent, at least sometimes, and
it sure beats breaking rocks or changing bedpans.
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