LeRue Grim in the United States
LeRue Grim, a San Francisco Attorney
Grim is an attorney with a checkered past. Decades ago, he worked as a dog trainer. Then, after graduating from an unaccredited law school, he went on to win two precedent-setting cases before the state supreme court. “There is no question that in the courtroom Mr. Grim has the intellectual resources to make him a good lawyer,” Peele allows. But the lawyer’s career subsequently ran into trouble (in 1997 the high court suspended his bar license for 30 months for professional misconduct), and now, at the age of 83, he maintains a marginal practice in one of San Francisco’s seedier neighborhoods. He is well known by its profile in the Chauncey Bailey Trial (see below).
LeRue J. Grim, in California Lawyer
By Thomas Peele. He is an investigative reporter for the Bay Area News Group and the Chauncey Bailey Project. His book about Black Muslim beliefs and the murder, Killing the Messenger, was published by the Random House imprint Broadway Books in 2012.
LeRue Grim is 83, and his nearly half-century career is littered with accusations of serious professional misconduct against him–many of them substantiated. At the conclusion of his disciplinary trial, for instance, Judge Eugene E. Brott wrote: “Although Respondent has been in practice for more than 30 years and is well-known for his zealous advocacy for his clients, the Court is deeply troubled by Respondent’s absolute blindness to conflicts of interest and professional ethics.” But Brott rejected the prosecutor’s argument for disbarment, recommending instead that the supreme court impose a 30-month suspension. It did. (In the Matter of LeRue Grim, Nos. 94-0-17544, 94-0-19001 (consolidated) (St. Bar Ct. Jan. 21, 1997); No. S060817 (Cal. Sup. Ct. discipline order July 1, 1997).)
More than a decade later Grim largely resides in his office, a wizened man, often in a soiled trench coat, taking meals at Deli De Leon and accepting clients from society’s margins–desperate, often unsophisticated people with cases no one else wants.
Despite his record of discipline, Grim continues to claim in interviews that he never intentionally harmed or deceived a client. In the preface to an autobiographical essay on his website entitled “The Kind of Person I Am,” he writes, “[A] small percentage of people will try to take advantage of a person who is sympathetic and supportive.” Such people include “individuals who are psychologically deeply flawed” and who “want more than good legal advice, they want a close, dependent relationship with me and for me to do unreasonable things with them. A lawyer must protect himself from those persons, or he will end up with the problem I have.”
There are still clients willing to overlook Grim’s transgressions. Hogan sought out Grim because he had represented both him and, over the years, other members of Broussard’s extended family. As Grim told me, “Lester said, ‘We’ll try to get some money together,’ but his nephew needed a lawyer right away.”
Daro Inouye, a retired San Francisco deputy public defender, has known Grim for years. “[He] has generational contacts around the Hall of Justice. He has street credibility he’s built up. I was aware of his problems, but nonetheless I felt he was a very skilled trial attorney.”
Grim “is a man of contradictions,” Inouye adds. “He’s done good for people, but his reputation suffered. It isn’t something you can overlook. You take the person for who he is.”
Who Grim is, I have come to realize, is the lawyer of last resort–the one a man like (Broussard needs) from jail.
LeRue Grim once trained show dogs, an avocation that grew from his childhood in suburban Detroit, where his family raised Doberman pinschers. He joined the Air Force in 1946 after high school and eventually was stationed near Sacramento. After his four-year hitch, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a professional dog trainer and ended up playing a wild animal trainer on a children’s television show.
Behind Grim’s desk, on an office wall that looks as if it were once white, hangs a painting of a gathering of people in Victorian garb. Central in it is a tall figure with a stove-pipe hat that might be Abraham Lincoln, although the face is represented simply by a dull slap of flesh-colored paint. On the frame is a small gold plate engraved with the name “Belli.” The painting, Grim says, came from one of attorney Melvin Belli’s many wives; he can’t remember which one. “It was a gift,” he says. “I trained her dog.” But that was the problem with dog training: Sometimes what you got for it was a bad painting.
Another piece of art hanging in one of his back rooms may better serve as Grim’s antecedent. It is a print of M. C. Escher’s lithograph Relativity, which depicts a world where the normal laws of gravity and nature don’t apply: Stairways lead in multiple directions, adding dimensions that the eye and brain cannot grasp. Consider Grim’s route to the law, and his initial success.
In the early 1960s, Grim decided to give up canines. Lacking an undergraduate degree, he entered Lincoln University Law School, then in San Francisco and unaccredited. He attended night classes while continuing to appear on television and work with dogs. He was admitted to the California bar in January 1966.
According to his website Grim won his first criminal jury trial, and then received calls from his client’s former cellmates. “In my first seven jury trials I won four acquittals and three hung juries,” he boasts. “I was exhilarated and exhausted.”
As Grim trolled for clients at the Hall of Justice, he also applied for court-appointed appellate work. Two years out of Lincoln he found himself arguing before the state supreme court, representing a Soledad state prison inmate who had been sentenced to death for stabbing another prisoner. Ralph Chacon and his two codefendants were lifers, and the law at that time made them death-penalty eligible for assault.
At their trial in Monterey County, all three were represented by a single lawyer. The defendants argued on appeal that each should have been provided separate counsel, especially in the trial’s penalty phase. The case, People v. Chacon, became known for Grim’s client, and all three convictions were reversed on a unanimous vote (69 Cal. 2d 765 (1968)).
Another of the men had been represented by Ollie Marie-Victoire, who later became a San Francisco judge. “For me, [Chacon] was important in that I prevailed,” she told me at her home in San Mateo. Marie-Victoire recalls that the state supreme court justices thought that Grim “wrote a better brief than I did, and he got paid more. That sort of hurt my feelings.”
The next year Grim was back before the state supreme court representing another death row inmate, William Albert Tahl, who had pleaded guilty to killing a husband and wife in San Diego.
Grim argued that because Tahl had failed to understand the consequences of his plea, it was made involuntarily. In fact the high court’s opinion, written by Chief Justice Stanley Mosk, cited a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that it cannot be assumed from a silent record that a guilty plea forfeiting constitutional rights had been made voluntarily (Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238, 243 (1969)). But the California justices ruled that Boykin could only “be applied prospectively.” (In re Tahl, 1 Cal. 3d 122, 130 (1969).) Even so, they reversed Tahl’s death penalty on other grounds and ordered a retrial of the penalty phase.
Grim considers the Tahl victory the high point of his career. Three lawyers from the Attorney General’s office had argued for the state, including one named Ronald M. George. As the ruling began to change how judges admonish defendants before they enter guilty pleas, it is difficult to imagine two California lawyers embarking on more divergent trajectories than LeRue Grim and the future Chief Justice of California.
Grim’s career began to slip within a few years. He was overwhelmed by casework, unorganized, putting off clients, missing court dates. Marie-Victoire was San Francisco’s calendar judge in the mid-1970s when she noticed one morning that Grim had six felony cases scheduled for trial on the same day. And he was nowhere to be found–not in court, not answering his phone, not at his office across Bryant Street.
Marie-Victoire laughs now when she tells the story, but says she was extremely angry at the time. She was “making my record” of the matter and preparing to have Grim brought in for a contempt hearing when a public defender spoke up in his defense, saying Grim must have had some kind of dire emergency. She cooled down. When Grim showed up the next day, he claimed he had been stuck in traffic in San Jose. The judge fined Grim. “I made it painful,” she says.
Marie-Victoire said that although Grim was developing a reputation for unreliability, he had talent. “He was a good trial lawyer once you got him in court. He was a good questioner, he was good with jurors.”
Former deputy PD Inouye remembers when Grim defended a client charged with stabbing a man in the head during a street fight–a case that looked like “a dead-bang loser” for any defense lawyer.
The prosecution’s chief witness, Inouye recalls, was an “intelligent, articulate, highly educated woman” who lived above the crime scene. She testified that she’d heard the fight and opened her blinds just as Grim’s client committed the stabbing. “I believe she thought she was telling the truth,” Inouye says.
Grim cross-examined the witness slowly. “He is not bombastic, he is not overly aggressive,” Inouye says, remembering the exchange. “He educates the jury. The witness wasn’t defensive, but she wanted to let everyone know that some little guy in half glasses wasn’t going to trip her up.
“[Grim] says, ‘The curtain you have is quite heavy, isn’t it?’ The woman said yes.
” ‘And that’s because there’s a very, very bright streetlight directly outside your window, right?’ ”
Yes, she answered.
” ‘And when you heard the yelling and jumped out of bed and pulled open the curtain that light was right in front of you?’ ”
Yes.
” ‘And your room was very dark, correct?’ ”
Yes.
” ‘And you looked into the light and it blinded you, didn’t it?’
“There was a lengthy pause,” Inouye recalls. “The courtroom was totally quiet.”
The woman hesitated, and then said yes.
“It was astounding for me to watch.” Inouye says. “It imprinted in my mind, because I was a young lawyer, a product of the 1960s. I thought you were supposed to yell and scream.”
Grim doesn’t remember the case, and Inouye can’t recall its outcome. But it was Grim at his best–a level of lawyering that he could not maintain. Soon he was driving the audacious blue Rolls-Royce, and rumors swirled that he had obtained it from a drug-dealing client who was short on cash.
I have asked Grim repeatedly about that rumor in the four years I have known him. Finally, he admitted accepting the Rolls for payment. But the client was not, he insisted, a drug dealer–just someone in over his head trying to satisfy a debt.
Getting straight answers from Grim is a challenge. Though he dodged telling me about the car, he then offered that a former client once ran a marijuana growing operation down the hall from his office–right across Bryant Street from police headquarters.
Grim does not like to discuss his personal life. He is divorced, with nine children by five different women. The appearance of his office (there are numerous stashes of groceries and medicines in the back along with a blanket-covered cot)–and the fact that he often wanders the rooms in a bathrobe–suggest it is his primary domicile.
As his career began to unravel, Grim was missing more than court dates and filing deadlines. To hear him tell it, he had too many clients and the inability to say no. “I wish I’d been more aggressive in limiting my workload,” he says. “It all makes me look like a flake.” But in complaints filed with the State Bar, Grim’s clients began laying out a troubling pattern.
According to State Bar records, Grim repeatedly told clients he’d filed cases for them when he hadn’t. One instance involved a poor woman, unfamiliar with the legal system, who hired him to appeal her son’s rape conviction. The San Francisco woman testified at Grim’s disciplinary trial that for seven years he maintained that the appeal was pending, even though her son’s appellate rights had long expired because Grim never filed an opening brief. When she eventually confronted him, Grim broke down, admitting the truth and rationalizing his deceit. She said he told her, “You were hurting so bad, and I didn’t want to hurt you more!”
Still, he somehow convinced the woman to pay him another $3,000 to prepare her son for a parole hearing–even though she found out later he wouldn’t be eligible for another six years. When the woman again confronted Grim, he claimed that he’d tried to visit her son in prison but was turned away because he didn’t have a valid ID: His driver’s license had expired.
Even though the State Bar’s Judge Brott found the woman’s claim credible, Grim denies any wrongdoing. “I told her the appeal had no merit,” he says.
Another complaint against Grim came from the 20-year-old wife of a client he was defending in 1991 against murder and drug charges in Tuolumne County. The woman was living in a house trailer, where Grim began staying during trial preparation. He was 63.
His version of events goes like this: Shortly after they met, the woman showed him dozens of photographs of herself giving birth to her two children. “Even in childbirth,” Grim recounts on his website, “she was very attractive and she knew it.” He found it strange that she would show him something so personal and intimate, but he deemed that she was vital to her husband’s defense so he said nothing. “I had to keep her on the team,” he wrote.
Then one night, he awoke to find her in bed with him. The sex that followed, Grim testified in State Bar Court, occurred without his consent–a claim Judge Brott called “preposterous.” On his website, Grim writes, “I should have jumped out of bed and left. I didn’t. I intended to get up. It was cold. … She began to do provocative things to me. … I felt excited and extremely nice.” When it was over they agreed it would not reoccur, and that was the “full extent” of the sexual relationship.
Yet according to Judge Brott’s summary of facts, the woman testified “that she and [Grim] repeatedly engaged in sexual acts before, during, and after [her husband’s] trial.” She “became pregnant and had an abortion … [Grim] paid the hospital bill.” Grim also had admitted to a sexual relationship in answers to interrogatories from a civil suit the woman and her husband brought against him, Brott noted.
Grim continues to claim that there was only one sexual encounter, which occurred against his will. He also says he was never convinced the woman was pregnant, believing she extorted money from him.
The woman’s husband was convicted. To pay Grim, the couple had agreed to quitclaim some land to him, which the attorney would then sell and take a reasonable fee. But Tuolumne County seized the property as drug proceeds under civil forfeiture statutes. At hearings on the seizure proceedings, Grim represented both the couple and himself, never suggesting that they seek separate counsel since they had a competing interest in the property. The client and his wife “were not sophisticated people,” and Grim clearly took advantage of them, Judge Brott wrote in his summary.
Grim eventually succeeded in beating back the civil forfeiture and sold the property. Some of the proceeds were supposed to pay for his appeal of the murder conviction. But according to his disciplinary records, Grim never filed an opening brief and didn’t inform his client of this until the deadline had passed.
By 1997 Grim faced disciplinary charges in both the San Francisco and Tuolumne County matters; previously he had been given two private reprovals for failing to inform clients of important developments in their cases. Brott found Grim culpable of multiple counts of misconduct but determined that the prosecution had failed to make a compelling case for disbarment. Grim’s suspension order was signed by Chief Justice George, his old adversary in the Tahl case.
“I think I was a target,” Grim told me recently. “I made the mistake of thinking the State Bar would treat me fairly.”
After his suspension ended, Grim limped back into practice. He says he decided he would operate differently, taking no retainers and asking clients to pay him incrementally as he worked.
Former deputy PD Inouye says that in essence, Grim began to run a small “alternate public defender’s office with a sliding scale.” Down-and-out clients–people like Lester Hogan–still looked for the blue Rolls-Royce on Bryant Street.