Harris Case Enhances Lawyer’s Repute

Last month, San Diego attorney Charles M. Sevilla started smoking again, just the way he did in 1982, the previous time a client of his, Robert Alton Harris, faced an execution date.

Sevilla hadn’t puffed on even one cigarette since Harris was spared--with four days to go--eight years ago.

But by the week before April 3, the day the state of California had announced it wanted to execute Harris, Sevilla’s office had turned into what he called a “smoke chamber.” That week, he and three others in his office laboring to save Harris had to pull three all-nighters, pumping out fat legal briefs for federal courts in San Diego, San Francisco and Washington.

Not only did they have to do the actual lawyering, they had to field relentless phone calls from the media, suffer crank calls from the public and cope with death threats.

“It was a crazy, crazy experience,” said Sevilla, 45. “That’s what I felt when I was experiencing it. I felt, ‘This is insane. This is not the way a law system should work.’ ”

The intense nature of the week before the scheduled execution left Sevilla, who is in private practice in San Diego, exhausted from an “emotional roller coaster” ride--and yet he was back at it again last week, filing another lengthy brief Friday on Harris’ behalf with the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The filing was made possible by the last-minute reprieve Sevilla earned for Harris just two weeks earlier from 9th Circuit Judge John Noonan. That reprieve, as well as the diligence that helped bring it about, have already enhanced Sevilla’s formidable reputation in the legal community as one of the best appellate lawyers in the state.

But, in standing up for Harris, Sevilla has performed another service, his attorney peers say. In an era of lawyer-bashing--and in the face of public opinion that was overwhelmingly against his position--his zealous advocacy stands out as an example of dedication to the profession and commitment to the client, according to other lawyers.

Sevilla, they said, is what an attorney is supposed to be--principled, devoted to public service, helpful to younger lawyers and active in the bar, the toughest of advocates when the fight is on but courteous to his adversaries outside the courthouse.

“He’s the best appellate lawyer I know, that I’ve ever had contact with--on the other side, that is,” said Louis R. Hanoian, a deputy attorney general in San Diego who has been matched against Sevilla in the Harris case.

Sevilla’s string of successes includes a victory in the U.S. Supreme Court just six years out of law school. In that 1975 case, Sevilla successfully argued that the federal Constitution required U.S. Border Patrol officers to have probable cause--or a strong suspicion that a crime is afoot--to search a car at the San Clemente checkpoint on Interstate 5.

Among his notable victories at the California Supreme Court was a case involving a Solana Beach insurance executive, Herman Martin, who was convicted in San Diego Superior Court in 1982 of second-degree murder for arranging the death of a La Jolla lawyer.

Sevilla took over on appeal and, in 1987, won Martin a new trial when the state Supreme Court agreed with his claim that prosecutorial misconduct improperly affected the case. The retrial never took place, though, because the case was settled three months ago under a plea bargain that saw Martin sentenced to prison time already had served.

Besides Harris, Sevilla’s current clients include Roger Hedgecock, the former mayor of San Diego, convicted of campaign financing violations. His appeal, which centers on a claim that the verdict was tainted by a bailiff’s jury tampering, is pending before the California Supreme Court.

‘I talked to lawyers around town, saying, ‘Who would you recommend for appeal work on my case?’ ” Hedgecock said last week. “To a person, they recommended Chuck Sevilla.”

Sevilla has been named one of the best lawyers in the country by Town & Country, a nationwide features magazine. Last fall, he was listed as one of the most respected lawyers in California in a statewide survey published by California Lawyer magazine.

“What he is extremely gifted at is weaving facts into legal arguments and getting the absolute most impact he can out of the facts he is dealt,” said Hanoian, the deputy attorney general.

There’s one other thing, said Michael McCabe, one of the two other lawyers who have been working with Sevilla on Harris’ behalf. Sevilla “has absolutely no concern for his own time. None whatsoever. He’d rather work than eat or sleep.”

Sevilla, said San Diego criminal defense attorney Elizabeth Semel, “epitomizes what law is about--wit, intelligence, integrity, stamina, the relentless pursuit of the best intersets of his client.

“Time and time again I get calls from parents, the prominent parents of some young person who’s gotten into some horrendous trouble--conservative, law-abiding people--and when their son is in trouble, they don’t look for Joe Sleaze,” Semel said.

“No,” she said. “They want Chuck Sevilla. They want the best advocacy for their child. All of those derogatory comments they may have made in general terms about technicalities, all those criticisms, are thrown to the wind when someone close to them is in trouble. ‘No stone unturned, no right that should not be vigorously asserted,’ they say.

“And that’s what the public has to remember,” Semel said. “That today it’s Robert Harris, tomorrow it may be someone they love. As hard as that may be to imagine, it happens.”

Sevilla, a modest man who does not seek out press attention, is uncomfortable with praise for his skills.

“The thing I can say about myself is I hope I strive to be competent,” he said.

All things considered, he said, he’d rather be a basketball star. His office sports two photos of him playing pickup hoops with former UCLA and professional star Bill Walton, one of which displays Sevilla getting off what he calls his “awesome three-quarter-inch jump hook” in front of Walton.

There won’t be any basketball for a while, however. The day the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn Noonan’s ruling, Sevilla, racing for the phone, ripped knee ligaments he had stretched a few weeks before during a playground game.

He needs surgery but, until there’s a window in the Harris case, doesn’t have time for it. Meanwhile, he said, “It hurts.”

Sevilla was born and raised in San Jose. He remembers “vividly” the day in 1960 when he was a sophomore in high school and Caryl Chessman was put to death at San Quentin.

“My English teacher, who I liked a lot, the day Chessman was executed, he had a radio on,” Sevilla said. “I could see it affected him a lot, and I got this idea that, hey, this hurts people. It hurt him and he didn’t even know Chessman.”

After going to college at San Jose State, Sevilla earned his law degree in 1969 from Santa Clara University, then took an advanced legal degree in urban law in 1971 from George Washington University.

For the next five years, he worked at Federal Defenders of San Diego Inc., the agency that represents poor people charged with crimes in federal court in San Diego. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976 to work for the state public defender, which handles appeals in the state courts for indigents.

After a few years of enduring and detesting Los Angeles smog, he and his wife, Donna, a travel agent, were ready to move back to San Diego. Sevilla joined up with his former boss at Federal Defenders, John Cleary, and went into private practice.

When he was with the state public defender, he said, he began helping McCabe with Harris’ case. By 1983, when he joined forces with Cleary, he “had a commitment to (Harris)” and “never seriously considered staying out of the case.”

The reprieve that was earned for Harris, Sevilla insisted, is as much the work of the two other primary attorneys on the case--McCabe and Michael Laurence of San Francisco--and his office secretary, Cynthia Campbell, all of whom worked with him through the nights. “It’s truly been a team effort,” he said.

Yet the whole thing is a waste, he said. “If they took a tenth of the money we spent on the death penalty and channeled it into helping the surviving members of the family of the victim with care to make the transition--if a breadwinner is gone, to help out with sustenance--that makes a lot more sense to me than what we’re going through now,” he said.

Another money issue--how much he is getting paid for representing Harris--has been a tremendous annoyance, filled with misunderstanding and innuendo, he said. He makes $75 an hour on the case--that’s up, as of last fall, from $40 an hour--or hardly a “money-making operation” in the inflated universe of lawyer salaries, commonly $100 to $200 an hour, he said.

“If the lawyers say they get $10 an hour, for those people who are avidly pro-death penalty, that’s too much,” Sevilla said. “Paying anything is too much. So the pay argument is for those who are avid proponents of the death penalty and critics of lawyers who defend people who are condemned.”

If representing Death Row inmates were a money-making operation, “you’d have lawyers--because there are a lot of lawyers--lined up out the door of the (California) Supreme Court looking for those appointments,” he said. “Instead, we have, what, 40 or 50 people who are up on Death Row without counsel.”

There are “so many reasons” to be opposed to the death penalty, Sevilla said. He has opposed it for years.

For one, he said, the fact that politicians are “so gung-ho for it and use it as a sales technique to sell their candidacies is a wonderful reason for people to have some suspicion about what this is all about.”

“Second, the fact that government administers this ought to terrify anybody out there about the fairness of a system in which the government is so instrumental in selecting who’s going to get it and who’s not.”

The Harris case itself points out “the advantage of these things winding their way and taking some time,” no matter how much that frustrates the public, he said. The case shows that “we have an imperfect system and, if you’re going to have a penalty which requires perfection, like the death penalty, you’d better give it time to work out.”

Until the case is over, one way or the other, Sevilla said, he expects it to continue to produce the same mix of “rewarding” and “nightmarish” moments.

“It’s something you look back at, in retrospect, and you say about others, when others are in this position, ‘Oh, what a wonderful thing this person did.’ And a lot of people would say that, in retrospect. But, when you’re living it, it’s much more difficult, and you sort of look forward to those days in the future when people will look back and say, ‘Yeah, he did what he should have done.’ ”

Sevilla said he is confident that Harris will prevail in his latest appeal--that is, that he will win a hearing on the new claims that mental disorders played a part in the 1978 killings of two San Diego teen-agers and should have been put before the jury that sentenced Harris to die.

As soon as he won the chance to try for that hearing--on April 2, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Noonan’s reprieve--Sevilla quit smoking.

He said he didn’t even think about cigarettes this past week, while preparing the new legal brief. And he vowed that this time around--without the stress of a looming execution date--his office will remain a smoke-free zone.