F. Lee Bailey dies, famed lawyer to O.J. Simpson, Boston Strangler

By Victor Morton - The Washington Times - Thursday, June 3, 2021

The famed lawyer whose cases ranged from the Boston Strangler and O.J. Simpson to Dr. Sam Sheppard has died.

Citing Mr. Bailey‘s oldest son, Bendrix Lee Bailey, TMZ reported Thursday afternoon that the famed lawyer died in hospice care in Georgia.

The younger Mr. Bailey said his father died Thursday morning, probably of old age. He said the death was not related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Mr. Bailey may have defined the “celebrity lawyer” as a type for the TV and mass-media era, also taking on such cases as the court martial of Capt. Ernest Medina in the My Lai Massacre and the armed-robbery charges against newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.

Ironically, for a lawyer who thrived on TV and publicity, one of his most famous and lasting cases was the Sheppard trial.

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Mr. Bailey persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to grant the Cleveland-area surgeon, who’d been convicted of murdering his wife in 1954, a new trial over prejudicial press coverage. He then won an acquittal in the second trial in the case, which loosely inspired the TV series and movie “The Fugitive.”

But perhaps his best-known case was of the most already-famous person to be accused of murder in an American courtroom — Mr. Simpson.

It was Mr. Bailey who conducted the first cross-examination of detective Mark Fuhrman, in which the Los Angeles cop claimed he’d never used the n-word.

“Any lawyer in his right mind who would not be looking forward to cross-examining Mark Fuhrman is an idiot,” Mr. Bailey said.

The defense team had tapes proving otherwise, and when played in court, Mr. Fuhrman had to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. These exchanges were widely credited with ruining the police and prosecution credibility with the mostly-Black jury that eventually acquitted Mr. Simpson after about an hour of deliberations over the months-long trial.

He also represented Hearst in one of the 1970s most sensational trials, in which she was accused of committing bank robberies after having joined up with the leftist-counterculture Symbionese Liberation Army who had kidnapped her for ransom.

She and Bailey’s argued a trial that she had been brainwashed into joining an “army” that had seized her a symbol of capitalist wealth — her father was newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.

But the jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to seven years in prison, of which she served 22 months before President Carter commuted her sentence in 1977.

Bendrix Lee Bailey told TMZ that while the family may hold a “celebration of [his] life, his father didn’t want a funeral and most likely will be cremated.

• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.