Wisely Seeks Further Delay in Sentencing

Convicted murderer Willie Ray Wisely, Orange County’s most renowned jail house lawyer, Monday unfurled a battery of new motions aimed at further delaying his day of reckoning with a sentencing judge.

Wisely, 34, who has spent more than six years in Orange County Jail, asked that Superior Court Judge Manuel A. Ramirez be removed from his case because he already had made up his mind to rule against Wisely’s motions for a delay. Ramirez had been set to rule on Wisely’s motion for a new trial and,if that were denied, to sentence him.

Wisely presented the judge with a motion asking that he be removed from the case because statements Judge Ramirez made Friday indicated that he was likely to rule against Wisely. Ramirez said that Wisely’s motion to disqualify him would be decided by a different judge today.

Eight Months to Prepare

Wisely also spent several hours Monday in proceedings aimed at changing attorneys, including serving a subpoena on Ramirez, which was later quashed. Although Wisely is acting as his own counsel, he has relied on so-called consulting attorneys appointed by the court. With his latest change of attorneys--his sixth since his original trial in the early 1980s--he notified the prosecution that he would need up to eight months to prepare.

“Our argument will be that he doesn’t even need an attorney,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Burl E. Estes said. “He is acting as his own attorney. He knows the ropes. He knows what he is doing.”

Monday’s legal maneuvers were the latest in a long string of motions that has delayed sentencing for Wisely’s 1982 conviction in the murder of his stepfather, Robert E. Bray. Wisely was found to have rigged the 2,000-pound cab of Bray’s truck to fall on him in a Huntington Beach street.

Although a jury ruled that Wisely be put to death for the crime, Superior Court Judge Kenneth E. Lae, since retired, dismissed that verdict and ordered a new penalty trial.

Lae cited a high court ruling that jurors should be instructed that they must find a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of any prior crimes before using them in deciding on a death sentence.

Wife at His Side

Wisely, dressed in the gold-colored jump suit of County Jail, was accompanied throughout Monday’s proceedings by his wife and legal clerk, Gail Marie Harrington, 25, who married him in a secret jailhouse ceremony last Christmas Eve.

Harrington, a third-year law student, has since been charged with smuggling drugs to another inmate at County Jail. She has pleaded not guilty in the case and been released on $25,000 bond.

In the courtroom to support Harrington and their son-in-law were Joe and Eileen Harrington, who have retained the San Francisco law firm of Larson & Weinberg to help prepare Wisely’s defense.

“The fix is in. Everybody knows it,” said Joe Harrington, a retired dockworker who lives in Newport Beach. “This man, this (Judge) Ramirez, is the hit man. He is the assassin.”

Harrington, who says he thinks he knows his son-in-law even better than his daughter does, said the defense believes it is a “foregone conclusion” that Wisely will be sentenced to life in prison by the Superior Court judge.

“They consider him a troublemaker,” Harrington said of Wisely. “They want to get rid of him.”

By virtue of acting as his own attorney, Wisely has won an inordinate amount of privileges at County Jail. He is the sole occupant of an eight-man cell block, filled with volumes of law books and documents; he has use of a computer and telephone and eats a low-salt diet.

Gail Harrington, who was helping to cart volumes of legal documents from courtroom to courtroom, said she was not sure what to make of Monday’s proceedings.

“We will just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow,” she said.