Ramsey Clark is a unique attorney whose list of clients reads like a who's who of political underdogs. After serving as assistant attorney general, deputy attorney general, and finally attorney general of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, he returned to private practice with a strong interest in international law and human rights. His liberal views on crime, particularly crime against the U.S. government, have led him to represent a number of individuals and groups that are notably disliked or feared by the U.S. public.
Clark was born December 18, 1927, in Dallas, to Tom C. Clark and Mary Ramsey Clark. He received his bachelor of arts degree from the University of Texas in 1949 and his master of arts and doctor of jurisprudence degrees from the University of Chicago in 1950. After being admitted to the Texas bar in 1951, he practiced law in Dallas for ten years. In 1961 he was appointed assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice. He served in that capacity until 1965 when he was made deputy attorney general. In 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him attorney general, a position he held until 1969.
Clark was politically well connected. His father had served as U.S. attorney general from 1945 to 1949 under President Harry S. Truman and as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1949 to 1967. President Johnson was not happy with Clark's performance as attorney general. Clark was criticized for being too soft on crime in the United States as well as too soft on defense. Clark was one of many 1960s-era proponents of a new approach to solving the crime problem—focusing on education and rehabilitation rather than punishment—and his influence extended into the 1990s.
In 1968, after Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (Pub. L. No. 90-351, 82 Stat. 197 [June 19, 1968]) to overturn Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966), Clark disagreed with the act and refused to apply it, a precedent that all U.S. attorneys general have followed since. The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which replaced Miranda's flat prohibition on the use of confessions obtained illegally, employed a five-part test for judges to decide whether a confession was voluntary (18 U.S.C.A. §3501(b)). Under the act, technical problems with Miranda warnings would not bar the use of subsequent confessions but beating a suspect would. The law remains on the books but has never been used.
Under Clark the Justice Department was considerably more liberal than it was under later leaders. The department opposed capital punishment, even in an incident where two Immigration and Naturalization Service agents were killed. While with the Justice Department, Clark brought future secretary of state Warren M. Christopher in to serve as deputy attorney general. Under Clark's authority, Christopher shepherded the 1968 Civil RightsAct (Pub. L. No. 90-284, 82 Stat. 73-92 [Apr. 11, 1968]) through Congress. The passage of the Civil Rights Act was a notable accomplishment because the United States was experiencing considerable civil strife and social turmoil and Congress did not want to appear soft on crime.
After exiting the attorney general post in 1969, Clark moved to New York City to practice law, taking on clients in matters of international law and human rights, particularly those with claims against the U.S. government—a unique position for a former attorney general. In particular, Clark has specialized in representing Middle Eastern groups and individuals, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Clark successfully represented the PLO in an action brought by the U.S. government to close the PLO's Permanent Observer Mission at the United Nations (United States v. PLO, 695 F. Supp. 1456 [S.D.N.Y. 1988]). Clark also represented the PLO in a suit brought by the survivors of Leon Klinghoffer, who was killed in 1985 while aboard the hijacked Achille Lauro (Klinghoffer v. SNC Achille Lauro, 816 F. Supp. 930 [S.D.N.Y. 1993]).
Clark has been unafraid to represent clients whose alleged crimes have angered and outraged U.S. citizens and foreigners alike, including two men who fought extradition to Israel: Abu Eain, accused by the Israeli government of a 1979 bombing that killed two in Tiberias, Israel (Eain v. Wilkes, 641 F.2d 504 [7th Cir. 1981]), and Mahmoud El-Abed Ahmad, accused of a 1986 terrorist attack on an Israeli bus in the West Bank (Ahmad v. Wigen, 910 F.2d 1063 [2d Cir. 1990]). To protest the United States' 1986 air strike against Libya, Clark brought suit against the United States and the United Kingdom on behalf of 55 Libyans seeking damages for injuries, death, and property loss sustained in the air strike. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia fined Clark for filing a frivolous lawsuit, one for which there was no hope whatsoever of success (Saltany v. Regan, 886 F.2d 438 [D.C. Cir. 1989]). Sheik Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Muslim cleric who was accused of conspiracy to wage a war of terrorism in the United States, also had Clark at his side in proceedings related to his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
Clark's practice has also included cases that arose out of wartime acts. He represented Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, who was accused of permitting his soldiers to rape thousands of Muslim women in Bosnian detention camps (Doe v. Karadzic, 866 F. Supp. 734 [S.D.N.Y. 1994]); Jack (Jakob) Reimer, an instructor at a World War II German SS camp in Poland who was accused of war crimes for participation in the murder of more than fifty Jewish civilians in the winter of 1941-42; and Bernard Coard and Phyllis Coard, former officials of the Grenadian government who were sentenced to death for murdering Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and his followers in the coup that preceded the U.S. invasion in 1983 (Petition for Provisional and Permanent Relief against Death Penalties and Sentences of Imprisonment, 137 Cong. Rec. H6305, 102d Cong., 1st Sess. [Aug. 1, 1991]). Clark also counted as one of his clients Captain Lawrence P. Rockwood who was court-martialed for dereliction of duty for leaving his Army post in September 1994 to investigate human rights abuses in a Haitian prison.
Clark has represented clients who were arrested while engaging in acts of civil disobe- dience including a group of people who protested at a General Electric plant in Pennsylvania where parts of Minuteman nuclear missiles were manufactured (Commonwealth v. Berrigan, 369 Pa. Super. 145, 535 A.2d 91 [1987]).
Clark's clients have included U.S. citizens who fought the U.S. government in court for reasons other than civil disobedience: Vander Beatty, a former New York state senator convicted of conspiracy and forgery in an election scandal (Beatty v. Snow, 588 F. Supp. 809 [S.D.N.Y. 1984]); followers of the Branch Davidians who sued federal authorities over the 1993 siege of the Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; and Lyndon LaRouche, who was convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy to defraud the Internal Revenue Service in connection with fund-raising efforts (United States v. LaRouche, 896 F.2d 815 [4th Cir. 1990], aff'd, 4 F.3d 987, No. 92-6701, 1993 WL 358525 [4th Cir. Sept. 13, 1993]).
One notable group of Clark's clients consisted of some attorneys and a judge who were sanctioned for their conduct in court. This group included New York attorney Arthur V. Graseck, Jr., who was ordered by a federal court to pay his opponent's attorney's fees for pursuing frivolous claims, under 28 U.S.C.A. §1927 and rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (Oliveri v. Thompson, 803 F.2d 1265 [2d Cir. 1986]; California-based civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman, who was suspended from the practice of law for criticizing a federal district judge (Yagman v. Republic Insurance, 987 F.2d 622 [9th Cir. 1993]; Standing Committee on Discipline v. Yagman, 856 F. Supp. 1395 [C.D. Cal. 1994]); and U.S. district judge Miles Lord, who presided over the Dalkon Shield class action litigation and was accused of prejudicial administration of justice (In re Miles Lord, NOS. JCP 84-001 and JCP 84-002 [8th Cir. Judicial Council 1984] (unreported order); Gardinier v. Robins, 747 F.2d 1180 [8th Cir. 1984]).
Clark supported Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement leader who was convicted of killing two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a siege on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1975, in his quest for a new trial (United States v. Peltier, 585 F.2d 314 [8th Cir. 1978], aff'd, Peltier v. Henman, 997 F.2d 461 [8th Cir. 1993]).
In 1990 Clark organized the Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East. He has served as spokesman for a U.S. group of supporters of Fidel Castro and has accused the media of presenting a one-sided view of Cuba because it has focused on the dictatorship rather than on U.S. efforts to undermine the Cuban Revolution. In 1993 he brought U.S. doctors, and with them eight tons of medicines and vitamins, to Cuba to help the population overcome shortages of medicines and medical care that have occurred since the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1993 Clark turned to the printed word to express his opinions about U.S. government conduct in the Persian Gulf War. In his book, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, Clark accused the United States of massive war crimes against Iraqi civilians during the 1991-92 Persian Gulf conflict.
If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of 
