Where Have You Gone, James Donovan, Our Nation Turns Its Fearful Eyes To You…[Updated]

/ Jack Marshall

Woo woo woo.

Yesterday, I was moved to re-watch “Bridge of Spies,” the excellent Spielberg and Coen Brothers-told tale of James Donovan, the lawyer (portrayed by Tom Hanks) who negotiated the release of Francis Gary Powers in exchange for convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Maybe something in the deep recesses of my mind was triggered by yesterday’s post about the rigged prosecution, trial and conviction of the four Minnesota police officers involved in George Floyd’s death. What was striking about the movie was that Donovan is shown being recruited by his law firm to defend Abel, described as “the most hated man in America” at the height of the Cold War, to demonstrate to the Soviets that we guarantee a fair trial and zealous legal representation to everyone accused of a crime, irrespective of public opinion and the nature of the crime. Everyone has the same rights.

Donovan did defend Abel, even though it is made clear in the film that the judge was determined to see him convicted and that Donovan himself as well as his family were endangered by his taking the case. After Abel was convicted despite the fact that the evidence used by the prosecution should have been excluded as the “fruits” of an illegal search, Donovan appealed the result all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, defying his firm’s opposition to him continuing the case. His partners argued that the unpopularity of Abel risks alienating clients. Donovan’s initial representation sent the required symbolic message, they said, and even though the conviction may have been unjust, there was no reason to be obsessed with those due process and rights details, not for an enemy spy who might have been facilitating an enemy’s nuclear attack.

But Donovan, the goody-two shoes idealist, actually believed in due process and the rights to a fair trial and zealous representation, so to the Supreme Court he went. Though Abel narrowly lost there in a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren publicly expressed the “gratitude of the entire court” to Donovan for taking on the case.

That was in 1960, sixty-three years ago. And I found myself wondering: what happened to so corrupt our justice system that American citizens and public servants like Officer Chauvin and his three fellow cops could be imprisoned after such flagrant violations of their rights because the public and the news media were demanding it. Chauvin is currently represented by a lawyer who doesn’t specialize in criminal law, and his law firm is a tiny one, with just five members. No big firm or high-profile lawyer would take on the case, fearing a loss of business and a client exodus, though Chauvin’s alleged crime was not on the scale of Abel’s; it wasn’t even a so-called hate crime. I suppose maybe Gregory Erickson, handling Chauvin’s appeal, is, like Donovan proved to be, a skilled and dedicated champion of the Bill of Rights—he’s trying to get Chauvin’s case reviewed by SCOTUS— but Donovan was well-known in the profession as one of the Nuremberg prosecutors. In the 1920’s, Clarence Darrow would have taken on the representation of the four police officers just as he accepted the representation of two rich Jewish teens who killed a boy just to prove that they were superior. In the following decades, it might have been Donovan, F.Lee Bailey, William Kunstler, Leslie Abramson, or Alan Dershowitz who would take on the defense of someone as unpopular as Chauvin. But in 2023, only a previously unknown lawyer who doesn’t list criminal defense among his specialties is the sole attorney willing to fight for the core principles that are supposed to form the foundation of our justice system.

“Leslie Abramson”and “Alan Dershowitz” best fit the meter of the Simon and Garfunkle song, but I want to sing out, “Where are the equivalents of these lawyers who, like Donovan, would fight for the Bill of Rights regardless of the angry threats and screams coming from the lynch mobs? Where is the legal profession’s integrity and courage? How did our lawyers become so compliant with the worst instincts of our society, and so dedicated to profits over principles?”

Most of all, I want to know how we can reverse this dangerous trend.

10 thoughts on “Where Have You Gone, James Donovan, Our Nation Turns Its Fearful Eyes To You…[Updated]”

  1. I wondered about another attorney, John Adams, who took up the defense of the nine British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre. I know that goes way farther back, but that time may have been as politically charged as was 2020, and I would wager the Redcoats were, by and large, far more disliked by the Colonists than law enforcement is today. I was going to comment about it in the other discussion thread, then didn’t. I do so here.

    Now that I think about it, British soldiers were tasked with maintaining order in and around Boston, so in fact they were kind of equivalent to law enforcement. There could be some very interesting parallels.

    I believe Adams lost some popularity for his defense (which led to most of the soldiers being acquitted), but years later, he was elected VP and then President.

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  2. “‘Leslie Abramson’ and ‘Alan Dershowitz’ best fit the meter of the Simon and Garfunkle song…”
    Surely Donovan’s friends and family called him Jimmy or Jamie at some point.

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  3. You can’t reverse the trend without rebuilding the entire education establishment and the entire legal establishment. The entire system is rooted in Marxist ideology and that is dominated by cultural Marxism and intersectionality. From K-12 to Bachelor’s degree to JD, indoctrination is the name of the game. No one who questions the party line has much of a chance of success.

    I would not say they are putting ‘profits above principles’, however. They are enforcing good intersectional cultural Marxist principles. No one has the courage to defy the party line. It will cost them money because their clients don’t have the courage to defy the party line. What you are seeing is that the upper class has almost universally abandoned American principles for intersectional cultural Marxist principles.

    The real question is “How do you reclaim your country after you have let a foreign adversary conquer and dominate it?” We let people hostile the this country and its values take over every influential institution. We let them be teachers, we let them be journalists, we let them dominate the entertainment industry. After a generation, they had thoroughly indoctrinated the country. One entire political party and at least half the other has also been infected with this disease. If you don’t think this country has been conquered and dominated, we just let a PLO employee vet illegal immigrants for Homeland Security and we let three employees of Iran negotiate our treaties with Iran. We give more money for Ukraine to defend its borders than we use to defend ours. Our military is focused on how to change our military men into women, our military women into men, and arranging airline flights to blue states so military personnel can get abortions. At the same time, we have unidentified objects flying over our military bases that we don’t have the capability of dealing with, Russia is building artillery shells at 7x the rate we (all of NATO) are, and tanks at double the combined maximum rate of all NATO countries. China’s shipbuilding capacity is 200x our own. China built hypersonic missiles using US technology, but we can’t build one ourselves.

    I see two ways out of this:
    (1) We continue on and this Marxism will take over the country until it all resembles San Francisco and Portland. As with the collapse of the Soviet Union, organized crime will move in to provide some semblance of law and order. The gangsters will become politicians and we will get a government like Russia has now.

    (2) The parts of the country with some grasp of reality and sense can secede from the country in a bloodless or bloody civil war (depending on the will of the coasts).

    Tolerance has to have its limits. You can’t allow your country’s enemies to invade your country physically or intellectually. We have allowed both.

    Sorry for how dark this post is, it has been a bad Monday.

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  4. I didn’t know that the lawyer was not even a criminal defense attorney. Is that grounds for an appeal on “ineffective Counsel?”

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