Tuffree Case Will Present a Clash of Style, Substance : Lawyers: Prosecutor Peter Kossoris and public defender Richard Holly bring distinctly different approaches to life and work. They’ll face off in the trial of a man accused of killing a Simi police officer.

The opposing lead attorneys in the Daniel Allen Tuffree death-penalty trial bring to the courtroom two completely different personalities.

Peter Kossoris is one of the top prosecutors in the Ventura County district attorney’s office. He is a bright man who holds history and business degrees from Stanford and a law degree from Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

He loves watching reruns of “The Newlywed Game” because of the arguments couples get into. He tunes his satellite dish to every pro football game he can find and loves listening to operetta, an odd blend of opera and Broadway musicals.

Richard Holly, Kossoris’ adversary in the Ventura County public defender’s office, is a former Colorado ski bum who graduated in the top 10% of his class at Hastings College of Law at UC San Francisco. He is now a small rancher in Ojai, an obsessive jogger who says his career choice was greatly influenced by author Jack Kerouac and “Perry Mason.”

No more divergent paths could be found than those that have placed Holly and Kossoris in the same courtroom to wrestle over pretrial motions in a fight for the life of Tuffree. When the case goes to trial, it will represent the first time the two have squared off in a death-penalty trial.

Kossoris wants to send Tuffree, 48, to the gas chamber in the killing of a 28-year-old Simi Valley police officer in August.

Holly, Tuffree’s court-appointed counsel, argues that the shooting was the result of an overly aggressive response by police and he is working full time to save his client’s life. This is Holly’s first death-penalty trial, which is scheduled to start next month but will probably be delayed until next year.

As Kossoris sees it, Tuffree is an unrepentant, coldblooded killer who deserves to die for the death of Michael F. Clark, the first officer in Simi Valley to die on duty.

Day after day, dressed in his usual business suits, white shirt and wingtip shoes, the 58-year-old Thousand Oaks resident makes his case to the judge as a banker might pitch an investment idea to shareholders. Kossoris’ high-pitched voice clashes with his determined demeanor in the courtroom. His slim 5-foot, 6-inch frame often remains in his chair as he calmly argues his case.

“He is the quintessential prosecutor,” said Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury.

Kossoris likes sending the guilty to Death Row. A yellowed newspaper clipping of his first death-penalty prosecution--which was successful--has a permanent and prominent display alongside pictures of his family on his office wall. A picture of comedian Steve Martin hangs incongruously on the same wall.

In the past 10 years, Kossoris has sent four of the six men he has prosecuted in death-penalty cases to Death Row, though none has yet been executed.

“Mark Thornton will probably outlive me,” Kossoris says of the last killer he sent there.

Some defense attorneys have nicknamed Kossoris “Dr. Death.”

Holly offers a physical and philosophical contrast to Kossoris. The few feet of carpet between the two lawyers in the courtroom is separated by an immeasurable ideological gulf.

Wearing shoes more comfortable than stylish, dress suits that were bought without much thought and displaying the persona of an absent-minded professor, Holly battles, as he sees it, to save the life of a man wrongly accused.

Tall and lanky, Holly rises from the defense table often to clash with Superior Court Judge Allan Steele as he argues passionately for any small advantage he can gain for Tuffree.

“He has had these kind of cases before,” said Duane Dammeyer, Holly’s boss and good friend. “He is thorough and thoughtful. He looks at these cases as a challenge.”

Whereas Kossoris is cool and calm, Holly is focused and intense.

Both come to court with distinctive styles molded by distinctive histories. But along with the differences come many similarities. Both men have three children and both have daughters in their last year of law school who are considering following in their father’s footsteps. And both their wives are educators.

Ellen Kossoris is a special-education teacher at Thousand Oaks High School; Carol Holly is principal at Topa Topa Elementary.

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Holly, 49, says he was pleased to learn as a teen-ager that his birth certificate has Berkeley listed as his place of birth.

The hospital where he was born straddles the Oakland-Berkeley line in Alameda County and he just assumed Oakland was listed as his place of birth.

Once he learned of his birthplace, Holly said he set out to do his hometown right.

At 20, he read Kerouac’s “On the Road,” dropped out of San Jose State and hopped on an eastbound freight train.

“I basically went out by myself to find America,” he said.

During the winter of 1966-67, Holly wandered into another liberal bastion--Aspen, Colo.--and stayed through ski season. He worked as a busboy atop Buttermilk Mountain and skied home every night.

But Holly soon got married and, with an increased sense of responsibility, went back to college. He graduated with honors from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, got homesick and applied and was accepted to Hastings College of Law.

Holly passed the bar in 1972 and he and Carol bought a farm in Oregon, a la beat author Ken Kesey, a contemporary of Kerouac. For two years, Richard Holly worked as a law clerk in Oregon’s newly formed Court of Appeal while the young couple tended to their livestock and horses on 40 acres of pasture and Douglas firs.

Today, Holly lives on three acres in Ojai, a half-mile from the home of Dist. Atty. Bradbury.

Holly still loves to talk about his travels, but gets skittish when the conversation turns to his liberal roots--those experiences that form the foundation of his philosophy and political outlook.

“I see a lot of people with a lot of problems,” Holly said of his clients. “And I’m not really into judging people. It’s also rewarding to find that I’m sometimes the only friend my clients have. I am definitely for the underdog.”

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Kossoris, who grew up in Palo Alto, went to law school in Berkeley in the early 1960s and took great joy in rebelling against the burgeoning liberal movement in that city.

“I used to watch the free-speech protests and tell my wife that if my kids ever did that, I would cut off all support,” he said with a chuckle.

Kossoris is a serious and sober man, but one with an understated and peculiar sense of humor.

He married his wife four days after their first date. “I figured the most important thing was to find someone who can laugh at my jokes,” he said. “The marriage turned out to be very successful.” Then he adds a quick afterthought, dryly: “Picking a wife is a lot like picking a jury--it’s instinctual.”

A sports nut, Kossoris has no allegiance to any particular team.

As long as the team is winning and playing a good game, Kossoris said he is an interested spectator. But if the team goes sour, well, Kossoris does not suffer fools gladly.

“That’s one of the reasons I have no desire to be a judge,” he said. “I wouldn’t have enough patience for some of my less prepared colleagues.”

Kossoris started his young adult life wanting to be a sportswriter. But when he discovered how little writers were paid, he quickly decided to set his sights on another profession.

“My mother told me I could be one of three things,” he said. “A doctor, a lawyer or a failure.”

Before he decided to attend law school, Kossoris worked for two years in the public relations department of Ford Motor Co. near Detroit.

But like Holly, Kossoris returned home to the Bay Area to attend law school. He graduated from Boalt Hall in 1962, and he took a job in the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

That was 33 years ago. Today, he still says he loves his job.

“I like to do a good job at something important,” he said.

But there is one outside pursuit Kossoris puts above all others: operetta.

“It’s the only thing I love more than sports,” he said.

Kossoris keeps a collection of compact discs in his office and listens to the quirky art form as he prepares for trial. He has 900 more CDs at home.

Operetta is an idiosyncratic mix of the low brow with the high. Gilbert and Sullivan were masters of the art. Imagine Pavarotti singing the lead of “Beauty and the Beast.”

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And so it happens these two men have become two of the most important figures in Daniel Allen Tuffree’s future.

Holly wants to save the high school teacher’s life. He contends that years of budget cuts have left the county’s mental health system partly to blame for the death of Clark. Further, Holly alleges that Tuffree, who suffers from depression, was merely protecting himself in his home while the police had no business invading his client’s privacy.

Holly said he believes he has a solid defense. And with the help of co-counsel Howard Asher, he hopes to persuade a Ventura County jury to acquit Tuffree.

Across the aisle, Kossoris and co-counsel Patricia Murphy work full time to send Tuffree to his death. Kossoris, too, said he believes he has a solid case. He and Murphy have already sufficiently persuaded the Ventura County grand jury to indict Tuffree on the capital crime of murdering a police officer while in the line of duty.