O.C. Attorney Battles for the Disadvantaged

The jury seemed spellbound as the attorney, Christopher B. Mears, passionately pleaded his case.

“Does he not bleed?” Mears asked, motioning to his client, Mashone Bonner, a homeless man who was suing the city of Santa Ana because maintenance workers had seized his personal belongings and thrown them away during a 1989 sweep of the Civic Center.

“Does he not cry? Of course he does; he cried on the (witness) stand,” Mears continued in his closing argument. “Does he not feel pain? Of course he feels pain. Does he not feel cold? Of course he does. Does he not feel loved?”

And then there was the dramatic pause.

Rejecting claims by city officials that the bedrolls of the homeless are lice-infested, Mears dug his fingers into Bonner’s graying hair and rubbed his head.

“Lice? C’mon,” he told the jury.

Like Atticus Finch--the fictional southern lawyer in the Depression-era novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” whom Mears idolized as a child--Mears had taken on a case that defied the mainstream public and political sentiment.

Where Atticus had implored the jury on behalf of his black client to remember that “all men are created equal,” Mears argued that day in April that a homeless man is entitled to the same constitutional rights enjoyed by the rest of society.

After 10 years in the profession, the 40-year-old Irvine attorney has developed a practice that is marked by his support for the underdog against the establishment--battling insurance companies, police departments and lately, the city of Santa Ana, against which he has won numerous civil rights cases on behalf of the homeless.

Those who have seen Mears work agree that he does not merely take a case; he embraces a cause.

Mears said he does not know, exactly, why he has such a strong sense of duty to those he believes are “victimized” by society. Perhaps, he said, it is because he grew up during the struggle for civil rights.

Certainly, he added, his views were shaped by the lawyers portrayed heroically in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Inherit the Wind”--lawyers he describes as on the “cutting edge of defending people’s rights.”

Ellen Sultan, a juror in the Bonner case, said she was skeptical when she first entered a courtroom and saw Mears placing his arm around his client, and being “buddy-buddy” with him. He was putting on an act, she thought.

But she became a believer. More importantly, she sided with the overwhelming majority of jurors who handed Mears a court victory and awarded Bonner $9,300, after deciding that the city, as part of its campaign to rid Santa Ana of the homeless, had violated Bonner’s rights by seizing and then discarding his meager personal belongings.

Sultan said Mears’ obvious concern for the case made her want to hire him if she ever needed help. “I had a feeling that if I needed protection, he would be someone who would protect my rights,” Sultan said.

Phillip D. Eaton, the city’s attorney in the Bonner case, concedes Mears is a formidable court opponent.

“You know he was an actor before he was a lawyer?” Eaton asks with a smile. “He’s a talented trial lawyer, and his acting experience helps out.”

Even Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young, who was Mears’ classmate at Santa Ana High School but finds himself on the opposing side in the city’s continuing legal battles with the homeless, had praise for the private attorney. “He means everything he says. He’s a guy with heartfelt and honest convictions.”

And Mears’ drive to correct what he believes are the injustices of his time are not limited to the courtroom. It also extends into his community and the world of politics.

As a supporter and ally of former Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, Mears recently served as the campaign finance director for Agran’s long-shot bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In Irvine, his past leadership in the slow-growth movement placed him in heated political disagreements with the Irvine Co. and Mayor Sally Anne Sheridan. Frustrated over his accomplishments as a political outsider, Mears has decided he will try to change Irvine’s civic policies from within, and is running for a City council seat in November.

“Does he hate me? Yes,” said Sheridan, who will not be seeking reelection. “Has he attacked me in public on numerous occasions with personal remarks? Yes. I find Mr. Mears quite abrasive, actually.”

But his friends speak just as fervently in his favor.

“He’s very committed, he’s very outspoken and he’s very courageous,” said Jean Hobart, an attorney and board member of the Santa Ana-based Poverty Law Center--one of several legal groups that has recognized Mears for his pro bono work on behalf of the homeless.

Growing up in Santa Ana in a household run by his schoolteacher mother and his grandmother, Mears said it was often assumed he would become a lawyer.

But after his Santa Ana High School years, which included playing on the same football squad with former NFL wide receiver Isaac Curtis, Mears decided to pursue a college degree in theater at Cal State Fullerton.

His education was interrupted by a three-year stint in Hollywood, where he looked for roles in repertory theater, landed bit parts in television programs such as “The Six Million Dollar Man” and “Insight,” and received a small role in the film “The Great Waldo Pepper” that did not make the final cut.

Disenchanted with the “business” of acting, Mears turned to law school at Western State University in Fullerton.

“I think what I underestimated about law at the time is what a creative process it is, because my preparation of cases for trial is very much like constructing a play,” Mears says.

In fact, his closing remarks in the Bonner trial seemed to echo lines spoken by Shylock in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”

Mears said he scripts out every case he tries in court, but his conviction is not an act.

He admits there is a danger of becoming too emotionally involved in some of the cases he accepts, but if he worried about that possibility too much, he might not take them at all.

“My personal belief is that you have to be passionately involved in your case and you should be, and that’s what will help you,” he said.

His most difficult cases, Mears said, have been the ones in which his clients were killed or injured by police while suspected of committing a crime.

But the issue that has caused his “political and cultural epiphany,” Mears said, is the plight of the homeless.

Three months before the world would learn of the videotaped police beating of Rodney G. King, Mears took on in 1990 the case of a homeless man whose beating by a Laguna Beach police officer was videotaped. The city agreed to settle the case for $100,000.

And in Santa Ana, where Orange County attorneys joined forces to provide free legal services to the homeless after police actions against them, Mears became involved in every civil rights case filed against the city. The out-of-court settlements in all the cases against Santa Ana have totaled about $500,000.

The Bonner case was the first to go to trial, and city officials plan to appeal the jury’s verdict and $9,300 award to Bonner.

Robert Cohen and Crystal Sims, attorneys with the Legal Aid Society of Orange County, called Mears’ continued involvement “courageous.”

“He has hung in there even though there’s a public backlash. And it’s not a popular cause now with the public, other attorneys and the courts,” Sims said, pointing to the growing outcry from Santa Ana Civic Center employees, lawyers and public officials to remove the homeless from the area.

He may have seen some indication of that two weeks ago, when he returned to Judge Eileen C. Moore’s courtroom to ask for about $47,000 in fees related to the Bonner case.

Before the hearing, Mears spoke of plans to return the money to the city if council members would pledge an equal amount to help establish a homeless shelter. The award, he added, would encourage other lawyers to continue defending the rights of the poor. But the judge turned him down.

He estimates that he has donated about 15% of his professional time in recent years to free legal services for the homeless.

He said he got about one-third of the $100,000 Laguna Beach settlement, but only $2,000 to cover his costs for representing Alejandro Garcia Ojeda, 21, who was arrested during a homeless roundup at the Civic Center and then deported to Mexico even though he is a legal resident. Ojeda received $20,000 from the city.

“I have had a lot of good verdicts and a lot of financial success. But none of it compares to being involved in the cause of representing some of these homeless people,” he said.