William Kunstler

William Kunstler (1919-1995) was one of the best known civil rights attorneys in the United States. His most famous trial was his defense of the Chicago Seven who were charged with conspiracy to commita riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

William Kunstler was one of the country's best known and most reviled radical lawyers, defending clients whom most attorneys shunned. He was revered by supporters and condemned by critics. His clients included civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., mafia don John Gotti, and a terrorist accused in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. Kunstler's most famous trial was the one in which seven people - the Chicago Seven, as they came to be known - were charged with conspiracy to commit a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois.

Kunstler was born in New York City, the son of a proctologist, Monroe Bradford Kunstler, and Frances Mandelbaum Kunstler. Kunstler had one brother, Michael, and one sister, Mary. He was married twice and had four children from the two marriages. His first marriage to Lotte Rosenberger ended in divorce in the mid-1970s. They had two daughters, Karin and Jane. Kunstler blamed the breakup on his long periods away from home defending civil rights causes around the country. His second marriage was to Margaret Ratner; they also had two daughters, Sarah and Emily. Kunstler graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School Manhattan Annex in New York and later from Yale University. After serving in the army in World War II, during which he saw limited combat in the Philippines, Kunstler came home and enrolled in Columbia Law School, and graduated in 1948. After he passed the bar, Kunstler and his brother, Michael, opened a family law firm of Kunstler & Kunstler. In the early 1950s, Kunstler taught law at the New York Law School.

Kunstler's career changed dramatically in 1956 when he represented a black journalist, William Worthy Jr., who was arrested because he didn't have a passport when he returned from a trip to Cuba. Kunstler successfully argued that the law was archaic and unconstitutional and the case was dismissed in 1961. Kunstler said in his book, My Life as a Radical Attorney, that this was the case that launched his career as a civil rights attorney. In his summation before the U.S. Court of Appeals, Kunstler would create one of his trademarks: reciting poetry at the start of his summations. In that trial, Kunstler opened his closing argument with a line from Sir Walter Scott's The Lay of The Last Minstrel: "Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said,/ this is my own, my native land." In addition to his unorthodox antics, Kunstler had a colorful appearance in court. His craggy face was accentuated by a raspy voice, unkept hair, and eyeglasses which were always perched on the top of his head. Critics called Kunstler a showboat and a publicity seeker. "To some extent that has a ring of truth," Kunstler said in an interview with David Margolick, special writer for the New York Times. "I enjoy the spotlight, as most humans do, but it's not my whole raison d'etre. My purpose is to keep the state from becoming all domineering, all powerful. And that's never changed."

After the Worthy case, Kunstler ended up spending a lot of time in the southern United States, representing Freedom Riders arrested on breach of peace and disorderly conduct charges for staging civil rights protests in places like Birmingham, Alabama, and Biloxi, Mississippi. Kunstler even marched in some of the protests. "The sixties was my time of transformation. During this period and into the 1970s I changed from a liberal into a radical," Kunstler wrote in My Life as a Radical Attorney. "I metamorphosed. As the movement expanded from civil rights to Black Power, from protest to militant dissent, I took almost all political cases that came my way." And when politics dissolved altogether, Kunstler was left "with celebrity socio-paths or just plain celebrities. By the end, he wasn't at the action, he was the action," a New Yorker magazine writer commented after his death.

Many of Kunstler's clients, though, were African American, some charged with murdering police or other high profile crimes, which made Kunstler unpopular with some segments of society. "For more than 20 years, my representation of Black defendants has been motivated by one of my strongest beliefs: That our society is racist," Kunstler wrote in his autobiography. It was during the social protests in the South that Kunstler represented Martin Luther King, Jr. on civil rights issues. Then in the late 1960s he became involved with the trial of the Chicago Seven, as the defendants came to be known.

The suspects had come to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago to protest the war in Vietnam. The proceedings were interrupted repeatedly by confrontations between Kunstler and U.S. District Court Judge Julius Jennings Hoffman. Courtroom decorum suffered as the defendants, Kunstler, and other lawyers battled with Hoffman, who seemingly lost control of the proceedings on occasions. One defendant, Abbie Hoffman (no relation to Judge Hoffman) would do handstands on his way into court, or pole vault over a court railing. Another defendant, Bobby Seale, who was national chair of the Black Panthers, at one point during the trial was ordered by Judge Hoffman to be gagged, chained, and bound to the counsel table. Kunstler, in his book, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, wrote this about Judge Hoffman: "He reminded me [more] of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland with her cries, 'Off with their heads,' than a dignified judicial figure." All defendants were acquitted of the most serious charge of conspiracy to incite a riot. Five were convicted of lesser charges, but those were dismissed on appeal. While the jury was deliberating the fate of the Chicago Seven, Hoffman found Kunstler guilty of 24 counts of contempt of court, one for each time the judge thought Kunstler showed disrespect and rudeness during the five-month trial, and sentenced Kunstler to four years and 13 days in prison. The charges were reversed two years later by the U.S. Court of Appeals, which ordered a new trial for Kunstler. Kunstler was convicted of two counts of contempt, but was not sentenced to prison.

Following the Chicago Seven trial, Kunstler said he felt he would sink into oblivion. But he was soon back in the national news in 1971 when rioting broke out at Attica State Prison in New York. Thirty-nine prisoners were massacred during five days of rioting, which Kunstler said was precipitated by inhumane treatment. Kunstler was called in as an intermediary and later filed lawsuits on behalf of prisoners.

Kunstler had often been the target of abuse because of the clients he represented, but nothing compared to the threats and harassments he received for representing Islamic clients in 1993 and 1994. Kunstler, who was Jewish, was considered a traitor by some. One of his clients, El Sayyida A. Nossair, was charged with murdering Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the militant Jewish Defense League and Israel's anti-Arab Kach party. A jury in New York City found Nossair innocent of the murder charge. During the trial, pickets paraded in front of Kunstler's home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan and windows were broken. Threats were also made over the phone when he represented Nossair's cousin, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City.

Kunstler, who became enamored with poetry while at Yale University, had many of his poems published. One of his last works was one entitled "When The Cheering Stopped;" it dealt with the arrest of former football star O. J. Simpson on charges that he murdered his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend, Ronald Goldman. "I was struck with the paradox of how quickly a sports idol can be caught up in a tragedy of immense proportions," Kunstler was quoted as saying in a Harpers ' magazine article. "Of one thing I am certain, this will not be my last sonnet about the matter." Kunstler died seven months later on September 4, 1995, in New York City, one month before Simpson was acquitted.

Months after Kunstler's death, supporters - as well as one vocal detractor - showed up at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City in his honor. Friends and clients, including poets Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg, civil rights leader Betty Shabazz, and Chicago Seven alumnus Bobby Seale, united with Kunstler's family members to share their memories of the flamboyant attorney. The New York Times quoted author Jimmy Breslin as saying, "Dying is no big deal; the least of us can manage that. The trick is how you live, and Mr. Bill Kunstler lived. He lived with a searing pace, a furious energy, and overwhelming love of right and dislike of wrong."

Further Reading

Kunstler, William M., My Life As A Radical Lawyer, Carol Publishing Group, 1994.

Harper's, February 1995, p. 28.

Nation, March 25, 1991, p. 364.

New Yorker, September 18, 1995, p. 39.

New York Times, September 5, 1995, p. B6; September 18, 1995; July 5, 1993; November 20, 1995, p. B11.

USA Today, September 5, 1995, p. 3A.

Washington Post, September 5, 1995, p. B4.

Associated Press wire service, September 5, 1995.

For more information on William Moses Kunstler, visit Britannica.com.

William Moses Kunstler rose to prominence during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He represented Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Chicago Eight. Politics and the law are inseparable in his philosophy. He was the author of twelve books, a sometime Hollywood actor, and a cofounder of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in Tennessee.

Even as a child, Kunstler liked trouble. He was born July 7, 1919, in New York City, the eldest of three children of Frances Mandelbaum and Monroe B. Kunstler, a physician. Ignoring schoolwork to run with a street gang called the Red Devils, he worried his conservative Jewish family. He read voraciously on his own, and by high school became a straight A student. At Yale, he majored in French and wrote his senior thesis on the satirist Moli;agere. Then he joined the Army and served in World War II as a cryptographer, taking part in General Douglas MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines, earning the Iron Cross, and rising to the rank of major. Afterward, he entered Columbia Law School, mainly to compete with his younger brother, Michael Kunstler.

Kunstler and his brother opened a law practice in 1949. The mundane work bored Kunstler, who wanted more challenge than handling annulments and divorces. He kept busy writing a book on corporate tax law, contributing to the New York Times Book Review, teaching at New York Law School, and hosting radio shows whose eclectic guest lists covered personalities ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Malcolm X.

In the mid-1950s, Kunstler successfully represented a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who had been denied housing because he was black. In 1956 a black journalist had his passport confiscated for violating a national ban on travel to China; he was later arrested on return from Cuba for entering the United States without a passport—in violation of an old federal statute. Kunstler persuaded an appellate court to find the statute unconstitutional. The case had been referred to him by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and a bigger assignment would soon be on the way. Meanwhile, he wrote Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? (1961) about the 1960 conviction and execution of Caryl Chessman, a case that had provoked international outrage.

In 1961 the ACLU sent Kunstler to Jackson, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were being abused by southern police officers and the courts. Known as the Freedom Riders, these young white and black people tried to force integration by riding interstate buses, flouting segregation laws. Beatings awaited them, followed by arrests and quick convictions for disturbing the peace. Kunstler found only hostility in courtrooms throughout the state. He lost case after case. He asked Mississippi governor Ross Barnett for help, but Barnett only lectured him on the need for segregation. Then Kunstler and a fellow attorney, William Higgs, devised an ingenious strategy: discovering an 1866 law designed to protect ex-slaves, they used it to have the cases of civil rights workers removed from state courts and heard by federal judges. The law also mandated that federal courts grant the defendants bail, something Mississippi refused to do.

The civil rights movement lived, prospered, and changed Kunstler's life. He helped found the Center for Constitutional Rights in Nashville, and with its resources, he was so ubiquitous in representing the new leadership that his motto became Have Brief, Will Travel. He defended Stokely Carmichael, president of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, against sedition charges. He represented leaders of the Black Panthers. But it was his involvement with another prominent black radical, Hubert Geroid Brown—better known as H. Rap Brown—that led him to a new crossroads. Brown's heated speeches around the country struck fear into Congress, which passed in 1968 the so-called Rap Brown statute (18 U.S.C.A. §2101). The law made it illegal to cross state lines with the intention of inciting a riot. Kunstler saw it as an attempt to crush free speech.

The Rap Brown law created Kunstler's breakthrough case, making him a hero to young people and a virtual outlaw to the legal establishment. In this case, he defended the Chicago Eight, a group of antiwar leaders charged with conspiracy after the Chicago police cracked down on protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Among the Eight were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden, and Black Panther party cofounder Bobbie Seale. The trial drew national attention, divided public opinion, and often thrilled with its circus atmosphere. Kunstler argued ferociously in court with Judge Julius J. Hoffman, especially after the judge ordered Seale to be gagged and bound to a chair.

After the jury's near-total acquittal of the defendants, Judge Hoffman slapped each defendant with a contempt-of-court sentence. He reserved the most serious punishment for Kunstler, giving the attorney four years and thirteen days in prison for twenty-four counts of contempt. However, this sentence and the sentences of the defendants were all overturned by an appellate court. Kunstler also managed to escape the wrath of the New York bar association, which ultimately dropped its bid to discipline him.

The era of protest that helped create Kunstler's politics came to a close in the early 1970s, but not without a last great upheaval. In 1972 and 1973, leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the historic town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in protest of the U.S. government's long practice of ignoring treaties and its hostility toward Native Americans. Kunstler was at the barricades during the seventy-one-day siege, and later he was in court to defend AIM leader Russell Means. He also represented Native American activist Leonard Peltier through fifteen years of litigation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, he represented reputed Mafia bosses, an accused murderer of police officers, one of the so-called Central Park rapists, a youth shot by vigilante Bernhard Goetz, a convicted Atlanta child murderer, and more. He became involved in the cases of defendants accused of plotting to blow up the World Trade Center in New York, as well as the case of Colin Ferguson, a Jamaican immigrant accused of killing six white commuters and wounding nineteen on the Long Island Railroad in 1993. Kunstler's proposed "black rage" defense of Ferguson—in short, that racism could drive a person to murder—provoked a fierce backlash from many critics, including Kunstler's frequent nemesis the attorney Alan M. Dershowitz.

At the age of seventy-six, Kunstler still reportedly worked fourteen-hour days in his home. Assisted by his partner, attorney Ron Kuby, he took most of his cases for free. He also did a bit of acting, appearing as a fire-breathing judge in director Spike Lee's 1992 film Malcolm X. In 1994 he published his twelfth book, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, in which he held to his belief that a revolution is still inevitable.

Kunstler died on September 4, 1995, at the age of seventy-six, of heart failure. Ron Kuby, his longtime law partner, vowed to continue doing free legal work in their firm, Kunstler & Kuby. Similarly, friends and family established the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice as a memorial.

William Kunstler

William Moses Kunstler (July 7, 1919 - September 4, 1995) was an American self-described "radical lawyer" and civil rights activist.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career as a movement lawyer 3 List of books 4 Pop culture references 5 External links

Early life

The son of a physician, Kunstler was born in New York City and educated at Yale College and Columbia University Law School. While in school, Kunstler was an avid poet, and represented Yale in the Glascock Prize competition at Mount Holyoke College.

Kunstler served in the U.S. Army during World War II in the Pacific theater, attaining the rank of Major, and received the Bronze Star. He was admitted to the bar in New York in 1948 and began practicing law. He was an associate professor of law at New York Law School (1950-1951).

Career as a movement lawyer

He was a director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1964 to 1972, when he became a member of the ACLU National Council. In 1969 he cofounded the Center for Constitutional Rights. Kunstler also worked with the National Lawyers Guild. He was a socialist who publicly declared his refusal to criticize any socialist country, such as the People's Republic of China, which fellow lawyer Alan Dershowitz criticized him for doing.

Kunstler's image was that of a strident radical who defended controversial clients, including Salvador Agron, Lenny Bruce, William Worthy, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders, Filiberto Ojeda Rios, Jack Ruby, Abbie Hoffman, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Jerry Rubin, Martin Luther King, Lemuel Smith, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, Ibrahim A. ElGabrowny, Gregory Lee Johnson, Wayne Williams, Larry Davis, Murray Gold, Michael X and Gary McGivern. In the Brown case, Kunstler worked with Baton Rouge civil rights attorney Murphy Bell.

He gained national renown for defending the "Chicago Seven" (originally "Chicago Eight") against charges of conspiring to incite riots in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. During the trial, he and co-defense attorney Leonard Weinglass were cited for contempt (the convictions were later overturned).

From 1983 until Kunstler's death in 1995, he employed future radio personality Ron Kuby as a junior partner. The two took on controversial civil rights and criminal cases, including cases where they represented Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, head of the Egyptian-based terrorist group Gama'a al-Islamiyah; Colin Ferguson, the man responsible for the LIRR shootings, who would later reject Kuby & Kunstler's legal counsel and choose to represent himself at trial; Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, accused of plotting to murder Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam; Glenn Harris, a New York public school teacher who absconded with a fifteen-year-old girl for two months; Nico Minardos, a flamboyant actor indicted by Rudy Giuliani for conspiracy to ship arms to Iran; Darrell Cabey, one of the persons who assaulted Bernard Goetz; and associates of the Gambino crime family. During the first Gulf War, they represented dozens of American soldiers who refused to fight and claimed conscientious objector status. They also represented El-Sayyid Nosair, the assassin of the late Jewish leader Rabbi Meir Kahane.

During the 1994-95 television season, Kunstler starred as himself in an episode of Law & Order titled "White Rabbit". It was based on the 1971 shooting of a policeman in connection with the robbery of a Boston Brinks truck by members of the Weatherman Underground.

In late 1995, Kunstler died in New York of heart failure at the age of 76. In his last major public appearance, at the commencement ceremonies for the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture and Planning, Kunstler lambasted the death penalty, saying, "We have become the charnel house of the Western world with reference to executions; the next closest to us is the Republic of South Africa."

William Kunstler was survived by his wife Margaret Ratner Kunstler and daughters Karin Kunstler Goldman, Jane Drazek, Sarah Kunstler and Emily Kunstler and grandchildren Jessica Goldman, Daniel Goldman and Andrew Drazek. Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler have recently completed a documentary about their father entitled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe which had its world premiere screening as part of the Documentary Competition of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

List of books

• Our Pleasant Voices, 1941
• The Law of Accidents, 1954
• First Degree, 1960
• Beyond a Reasonable Doubt? The Original Trial of Caryl Chessman, 1961 & 1973
• The Case for Courage: The Stories of Ten Famous American Attorneys Who Risked Their Careers in the Cause of Justice, 1962
• And Justice For All, 1963
• The Minister and the Choir Singer: The Hall-Mills Murder Case, 1964 & 1980
• Deep in My Heart, 1966
• Trials and Tribulations, 1985
• My Life as a Radical Lawyer, 1994
• Hints & Allegation: The World (In Poetry and Prose), 1994
• Politics on Trial: Five Famous Trials of the 20th Century, 2002
• The Emerging Police State: Resisting Illegitimate Authority, 2004

Pop culture references

• In the film The Big Lebowski, Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (played by Jeff Bridges) demands representation by Kunstler or Ron Kuby during the Malibu Police Station scene.
• Kunstler also appeared as himself for one episode of the television series Law & Order in the 1994 episode of "White Rabbit".
• Kunstler also appeared as a lawyer for Jim Morrison in The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991) and as a judge in Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992).
• Kunstler was parodied as an attorney representing R. Kelly during his trial for ‘soliciting a minor’ and/or ‘sex with a minor’ on the animated comedy series The Boondocks.
• In the 1996 Law & Order episode "Blood Libel", Jack McCoy says, "He's a political prisoner? Alice please, Bill Kunstler is spinning in his grave."
• Chicago 10, an animated documentary covering the trial of the Chicago Seven, includes original footage of Kunstler, and he is featured prominently in the animated reenactments.
• According to Lionel Shriver, the character of Joel Litvinoff in Zoë Heller's 2008 novel The Believers may be modelled on Kunstler. ^[1]

External links

• A Remembrance of William Kunstler
• Kunstler's speech at the University of Buffalo
• Center for Constitutional Rights
• William Kunstler at imdb.com
• William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice

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