A few weeks ago, Lawyer Percy Foreman
wearily confided to a friend that James Earl Ray would be his last
client in a criminal case. From now on, said Foreman, he would confine
his activities to only a few civil suits. “I am 66 years old,” he
explained, “and I don't need money. So why should I expose myself to
the agony of criminal cases?” Last week, however, after successfully
copping a controversial plea for Ray, Foreman was obviously feeling
perkier; he denied categorically that he had any notion of retiring
from criminal practice. No matter what he does, Foreman already has established for himself a
permanent place in the legal profession's hall of fame. “There is no
better trial lawyer in the U.S. than me,” he says unblushingly. And he
may well be right. During a career covering more than 40 years, he has
served as defense counsel in at least 1,500 capital cases in hometown
Houston and other cities. By his own count, a mere 64 of his clients
were sentenced to prison and only one was executed. That was a
convicted killer named Steve Mitchell, who Foreman still insists was
“as sweet and kind a person as ever lived.” Without Laughter. In the courtroom, Percy comes across at first as a fit
figure for ridicule—a shambling hulk of a man
with baggy pants. But his opponents know better than to laugh. Foreman
combines a superbly skilled legal mind with a brilliant sense of
showmanship. In one case, he defended a woman who had killed her
husband, a cattleman, because he had flogged her with a whip. As he
addressed the jury, Foreman kept picking up the long black whip from
the counsel table and cracking it ferociously. By the time he was
through, the jury seemed willing to award the lady a Medal of Honor. Another Foreman client was a woman named Mahotah Muldrow. She and her
husband got into an argument; he belted her around a bit. Thereupon she
shot him five times and then left him for dead in the front yard. She
drove” herself to the police station to turn herself in but, for some
reason, changed her mind and went back home. There, in the presence of
several neighbors, who by now had gathered around Mr. Muldrow's body,
Mahotah fired a sixth shot. Foreman won an acquittal by convincing the
jury that the first five shots had been fired in self-defense and that
the sixth was 1> the result of some sort of nervous reaction, and 2>
had missed. A favorite Foreman tactic is to argue that a murder victim was a rascal
who badly needed killing. That was part of his strategy in the
celebrated 1966 mariticide trial of Candy Mossler in Miami. Foreman
repeated time and again that the late Jacques Mossler had been a
“depraved” sexual deviate who might have been killed by any number of
people.
