One of the most famous trial attorneys of the 20th century and a proud son of Wyoming, Gerry Spence died Wednesday in his Montecito, California, home at the age of 96, his family says.
Spence was a legend among the trial bar, especially for his civil practice and criminal defense work.
He was known for his defense of the poor and injured, as well as for high-profile cases like the defense of Ed Cantrell in the famous Rock Springs murder case.
Spence rose to national prominence through a series of landmark cases, including a $10.5 million verdict for the family of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood; the successful defense of former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos; and the acquittal of Idaho survivalist Randy Weaver on the most serious charges stemming from the Ruby Ridge standoff.
His high-profile victories also included a $52 million judgment against McDonald’s and a $26.5 million libel award for Miss Wyoming against Penthouse magazine.
Beyond the courtroom, Spence began bringing lawyers to Thunderhead Ranch, in 1994, training generations of attorneys in the "Spence Method" - an approach centered on authenticity, emotional connection and moral courage. His program, Gerry Spence Method, continues today.
He was also a prolific author of more than a dozen books, a familiar voice on national television during major trials, and the recipient of lifetime achievement honors from the American Association for Justice and the American Trial Lawyers Hall of Fame.
Spence is survived by his wife of 57 years, LaNelle "Imaging" Spence; his children Kip Spence, Kerry Spence, Kent Spence, Katy Spence, Brents Hawks and Christopher Hawks; 13 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild, according to Chris Hawks.
Starting Out
Spence also prosecuted repeat killer Mark Hopkinson, the last person Wyoming executed in 1992.
Bob Schuster, Spence’s law partner of 25 years, said Spence had “a talent and a gift that I’ve never seen before.”
“Trials can be fearsome places. It is combat, and the stakes for winning or losing can be immense. Sometimes life or death,” Schuster told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday. “It wasn’t that Gerry had no fear. Instead, his strength was that he had the courage to face it. But faced it through going through preparation.”
That preparation included arriving at the firm at 5 a.m., even when it wasn’t a trial week, doing things like writing out voir dire (jury selection) questions; witness questions; opening and closing statements.
Spence had a reputation for flamboyance, “and that was partly true,” said Schuster. “But there was no flamboyance in his trial preparation or his work during trial.”
Preparation wasn’t all of it: Spence could read witnesses in the moment, Schuster recalled.
“We’ve lost an historic trial lawyer,” said Schuster. “But I want to add, his success as a trial lawyer and as a human being and all of his other achievements would not have happened absent his marriage to Imaging.”
In Spence’s autobiography “The Making of a Country Lawyer,” he called Imaging “my love.”
It was her commonsense, their trust in one another, and his reliance on her that underpinned the legendary status of Gerry Spence, Schuster said.
Twenty Below
Spence was born Jan 8, 1929, on a night his father remembered as “twenty below and blowin’” in Laramie, Wyoming. His family soon moved to Sheridan, where he lived through his freshman year of high school before the family moved back to Laramie.
Lauded as bright, if a bit of a showoff, by his childhood teachers, Spence skipped the second grade — and regretted it for years, since other boys turned to men before he did.
But he was no stranger to hard work and manual labor. He worked various jobs from the age of 10.
His parents, a rail tie chemist father and homemaker mother, worked hard. They were solvent during the Great Depression, wrote Spence in his autobiography “The Making of A Country Lawyer.”
Still, they paid a great portion of their family income toward $10,000 insurance policy Spence’s father had bought due to what Spence called the only part of his father that yielded to fear of what may come: his love for his family.
The insurance policy didn’t help when it mattered, and the father was sick for months, Spence recalled in his book.
“Yet, over the years I evened the score against that industry, evened the score not once but hundreds of times,” he wrote.
After graduating from Laramie High School he went on to the University of Wyoming, graduating in 1949, then graduating magna cum laude from the University of Wyoming College of Law in 1952.
He was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in May 1990.
Right out of law school, he started his career in Riverton, Wyoming, alongside Frank Hill, the father of now-retired Wyoming Supreme Court Justice Bill Hill.
Bill Hill knew Spence throughout his boyhood years, though the two did not often cross paths when Hill entered the law profession as an adult.
He was tall, blond-haired, smiling, energetic and “nice to boys,” Hill recalled.
You Won’t Enjoy That …
In 1962 while he was Fremont County attorney, Spence decided to run for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in the Republican primary election against incumbent Rep. William Henry Harrison.
Former Gov. Mike Sullivan (who was not yet governor at that time) warned Spence not to do it.
“He came into my office and asked what I thought of it,” said Sullivan. “And I said I thought he was nuts.”
In the House, Spence would be one of many voices, Sullivan warned. And it would drive him crazy not to be able to control the conversation.
Undeterred, Spence asked another friend in the law profession, Al Simpson, what he thought of the plan.
Simpson would later represent Wyoming in the U.S. Senate.
“What did Simpson say?” asked Sullivan afterward.
“He said exactly the same thing!” Spence told Sullivan.
Sullivan recalled the memory with a chuckle, “Al and I laughed about that.”
Harrison defeated Spence.
Riverton, Casper, Jackson
Spence soon set up a practice in Casper working with Bob Rose, until the latter became a Wyoming Supreme Court justice.
Then Spence teamed up with Cheyenne attorney Ed Moriarty.
He lived near Sullivan, who practiced law alongside and against him.
Sullivan studied Spence’s work at a wrongful death trial where Spence’s client was in similar straits to Sullivan’s.
“He was able to read people,” said Sullivan, adding that one of his colleagues remarked that Spence could hypnotize juries.
Sullivan wouldn’t go that far, he said, but he never underrated Spence. The man’s great talent was in his storytelling ability.
Spence’s law partners Moriarty and Bob Schuster could often push a case into settling just by saying, “You know, we’re going to have to bring Gerry into this case if you don’t settle,” Sullivan said.
Schuster joined Spence and Moriarty in the mid-'70s, and the trio formed Spence, Moriarty and Schuster in 1978, and moved the practice to Jackson.
That was in part because Spence had won so many trials against the local Casper doctors that they refused to treat Gerry and Imaging Spence, Schuster recalled.
Business in Jackson was good, and the three lawyers worked around the nation and became nationally recognized.
Paint Them A Picture
Spence in his childhood had worked on ranches. He herded sheep, hauled hay, pulled weeds, sold his mother’s cinnamon rolls from door to door and camped out in his own back yard while growing up in Sheridan so that his parents could rent out his room and put the money toward his college fund.
Though no stranger to physical toil, Spence preferred trades that involved talking. Teachers throughout his childhood called him bright, but his mother warned him not to be a know-it-all, saying, “Taste your words before you speak them.”
As a boy, Spence learned to get by on words when he sold flowers to local cafes and restaurants in Sheridan.
“Would you like to buy some sweetpeas, two bunches for a quarter?” asked the young Spence of a restaurant owner, through the phone in his family home.
The businessman said, “No, kid,” and hung up.
“That isn’t the way you do it,” Spence’s mother chided. “You say, ‘I have some very pretty, very fresh, very sweet-smelling sweetpeas here, and I can deliver them to you right away. And I only charge a quarter for my two bunches. Can I bring them to you?”
The boy questioned whether all that talk was necessary.
His mother retorted: “You have to paint them a picture.”
A Place Of Death
Spence loved animals and at first wanted to be a veterinarian, but the grisly parts of the profession repelled him when he worked in a vet’s office after his family moved back to Laramie the summer before his sophomore year of high school.
And by then, “I was addicted to speech,” he wrote. “How could one remain quiet when there was so much to say?”
His book is as much a tribute to Wyoming as it is to Spence’s father, home, upbringing and career.
It sketches the Sheridan, Wyoming Rodeo. The chokecherry trees of the Big Horn Basin. And a father-and-son shared quiet, outlaw thrill over taking a deer on the property of a rich landowner from England who had bought up the foothills property.
To Spence’s father it was the right thing to do, even if it was trespassing, the son wrote.
He carried the bloody lesson forward.
“The courtroom is a place of death,” wrote Spence, referencing the life-or-death consequences in many cases, both civil and criminal.
“Providing the poor man with a champion to fight for him may be more to ensure that the duel can occur in the first place than to provide the poor a chance at justice,” Spence continued. In his view, the judge must always be “the king’s man” — so he must always be the trespasser.
“It is then, in the courtroom, that I hunt and I kill, and for the killing to be right, it must be done cleanly, without unnecessary wounding; done with respect, done without waste, done without pleasure,” he wrote.
The opponent’s witnesses are a great quarry of the hunt, Spence added. “And if the killing is done right, and for the right reasons, the killing too, is right.”
The Mentor
Though a fierce warrior, Spence was a warm and generous mentor, one of his protegees, Jim Fitzgerald said Thursday.
“Gerry was generous with his time and advice,” said Fitzgerald, who took a course on the profession from Spence early in his own law career, when Fitzgerald was fresh out of law school and Spence in his early 30s.
Fitzgerald knew the man even before then. When Fitzgerald was 13 his father, a psychologist, had evaluated people for some of Spence’s cases, and remarked how intelligent the man was.
But what made him special as a mentor wasn’t his own intelligence, said Fitzgerald: it was his respect for others’ unique brands of intelligence.
“Especially with young lawyers, he urged them to be themselves in court,” said Fitzgerald, who went on to be a highly successful attorney himself. “He told them that being authentic was their great power – not to try to be like him or any other lawyer.”
“Gerry himself was authentic to his core,” added Fitzgerald.
The Prosecutor
In the death-penalty case of Mark Hopkinson, it was as if Spence won that prosecution in spite of himself, former Sullivan recalled, in a Thursday phone interview with Cowboy State Daily.
In January 1992, as the state of Wyoming prepared to execute Hopkinson, Spence called Sullivan and asked the governor to pardon the convict.
“I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” Sullivan remembered. But Spence said he didn’t approve of the death penalty and never had – though he had won that conviction in his representation of the state as special prosecutor.
Spence and his partner Moriarty took the case as special prosecutors, Sullivan remembered, in part due to their friendship with one of Hopkinson’s late victims, the attorney Vince Vehar.
Sullivan was surprised at Spence’s request, and the two men had a “civil discussion,” the governor said.
Sullivan did not pardon Hopkinson. He told Cowboy State Daily in a prior interview that it was a tormented decision, but since Hopkinson had ordered murders from prison, a simple prison sentence would not stop him from killing again.
Man’s Arc
Though Spence voiced a special vendetta against unscrupulous insurance maneuvers in his autobiography, he was a renowned insurance civil defense attorney during his Riverton days, Schuster recalled.
“He was successful as an insurance defense lawyer. So the insurance companies would ask him to represent them in cases outside of Wyoming also,” Schuster remembered.
Spence won a pivotal case in Denver, where the plaintiff “was apparently quite injured,” said Schuster.
Later, Spence saw the injured man at a grocery store, and was disappointed in what he’d done.
“He abruptly stopped representing insurance companies,” said Schuster.
That was about the time he teamed up with Bob Rose, “who was his own, remarkable man,” and decided to represent individuals against systems.
“He got saved,” said Schuster with a laugh. “And he started the firm, and met Imaging, and they got married.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
