Amid High-Profile Military Cases, Civilian Lawyer Stays Low-Key

His law office is not much bigger than a storage room, tucked away on the second floor of a two-story brick building. His name is not even among the attorneys listed on the outside.

Frank Spinner has no business cards set out in the foyer. He has no staff of investigators or researchers. His only employee is a part-time one--his daughter.

Spinner is so low-key that he sometimes surprises even his own clients expecting an entourage when he arrives to defend them.

“Where is everybody?” a client once asked him when he arrived in Tokyo with only his briefcase and one bag.

“Well,” he replied, “this is all you get.”

Although he has been practicing law for 20 years and has at least 200 cases under his belt, Frank Spinner is not exactly a marquee name. This is not Johnnie Cochran.

But in the world of military law, he’s a star. In the past five years, as a civilian defense lawyer in military cases, the former career officer has been at the center of one high-profile case after another, many of them politically charged with sex and scandal and headlines:

* Kelly Flinn the B-52 bomber pilot whose affair with a married man led to demands that she be discharged, which in turn led to a national debate about gender equality and morals in the armed forces;

* Army Maj. Gen. David Hale, accused of seducing the wives of his officers;

* Marine Capt. Richard Ashby, who faced court-martial this year in the deaths of 20 people at an Italian ski resort after his low-flying fighter jet severed a gondola cable.

Not Accustomed to the Limelight

The limelight is something new for the 48-year-old Spinner, who served as an Air Force lawyer before retiring in 1994 with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

His clients say he is an able, experienced counsel who is not afraid to take on the establishment and who knows how to use the press to plead their cases to the public.

His detractors within the military perceive him as sometimes using the press to make the military justice system look bad.

“I’m not sure they understand that my intent is just to represent my client and then engage in a public debate and let the public decide what they will,” Spinner says.

The word has spread that he represents his clients so well, as both an attorney and a friend, that he has to pass some of his cases off to other attorneys. “I don’t even have my cards out,” he says.

And he adds, joking: “I’m a 20-year overnight sensation.”

The truth is, he says, “I never had a dream ‘I want to grow up and be a lawyer someday.’ ”

Spinner once planned to become a pilot. At another stage, his strong faith pointed him toward the seminary and a career as a minister, following in his father’s footsteps.

Richard Spinner, 70, who now lives in La Veta, Colo., is a retired Presbyterian pastor. He retired from the Air Force as a personnel officer in 1972, then entered the seminary.

But then, in 1974, just as he was thinking of getting out of the Air Force and studying divinity himself --with further plans to return as a military chaplain--the Air Force offered him a deal he couldn’t turn down: law school and a chance to get out of remote Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, where he was a missile launch officer.

In return he would spend a career in the Air Force, which was having trouble keeping lawyers in the service. He received his law degree in 1977 from St. Mary’s University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, where he was born. Eventually he wound up teaching law at the Air Force Academy, from which he resigned as a cadet in 1970 to get married.

Outside of work, he participates in services, prayer and fellowship at the Fairfax Covenant Church, just down the road from his office.

“It really keeps my feet on the ground and focused on the really important things in life,” he says. “When you’re in the middle of a hurricane--and some of these cases have been like hurricanes because of the publicity and press--it really is important that you know what the ultimate values are. If I ever lose my sense of direction, then I’m not sure I can be effective for my clients.”

Between the Hale and Ashby cases, he attended a religious group’s conference for attorneys and their spouses, which he called refreshing.

“It’s through that that I can keep my marriage strong and my law practice strong,” he says.

Ashby was acquitted in March of involuntary manslaughter in the ski gondola deaths. But he was convicted in May of obstruction of justice for helping get rid of a videotape shot during the flight. He was sentenced to six months in confinement at Camp LeJeune, N.C., and dismissal from the Marines. Spinner is appealing.

Carol Anderson, Ashby’s mother, who sat through both trials, calls Spinner “a man of God . . . . He believes in Rich and his innocence. Frank and his family opened their home to Rich.”

Ashby, of Mission Viejo, Calif., said in an e-mail response to written questions that he hired Spinner over other high-profile attorneys because a family friend, also an attorney, recommended him.

“We knew Frank had the experience . . . ,” said Ashby. “We also like that he was a devout Christian.”

Ashby recalled that the first time they met, Spinner made him feel comfortable.

“I knew I could trust him,” Ashby said. “I felt like he truly believed in my innocence. I also felt he didn’t just want to defend me, but wanted to get to know me as a person and a friend. I needed that because I would be trusting him with my life.”

Besides, Ashby said, Spinner could “argue a point on the fly as if he had practiced it all week.”

Highest-Profile Case Was Kelly Flinn’s

Spinner says his highest-profile case was that of 1st Lt. Kelly Flinn, the United States’ first and only female B-52 pilot. In 1997 she was facing a possible court-martial on charges of adultery and disobedience.

The then 26-year-old pilot was charged with having an affair with a married civilian, lying about it to superiors and disobeying an order to end it; she was also charged with fraternization for a brief affair with an enlisted man.

Flinn initially held out for an honorable discharge, which would have allowed her to fly in the reserves; the Air Force sought a general discharge under honorable conditions. In the end it came down to whether Flinn would face a jail sentence if the case went to trial.

“I couldn’t guarantee that she would not get jail time, and so she had to factor that into her consideration,” recalls Spinner, who advised taking the general discharge. In the end, that’s what she did. Flinn declined to comment for this article.

In the midst of heavy press coverage of that case, it was revealed that Spinner had sent to the Secretary of the Air Force a list of cases of officers who he says had engaged in comparable misconduct but who had not been tried by court-martial.

“I never intended to disclose the identities,” he says

Spinner knows how to use the press, say military prosecutors, including Maj. Mike Mulligan, chief of criminal law for the III Armored Corps at Ft. Hood, Texas.

“I think Kelly Flinn was a press victory,” Mulligan says. “I think he got out in front of the story that he wanted to tell. . . . I don’t think Kelly Flinn was a sex case. I think Kelly Flinn was about disregarding orders, about lying, and if you ask John Q. Public what Kelly Flinn was about, it was a sex case.”

Mulligan was Spinner’s adversary in the Hale case, and the prosecutor says, “I consider him a student of the law.”

The Hale case ended in a plea bargain under which the general was heavily fined but escaped prison time. Admitting sexual involvement with the wives of officers serving under him, he pleaded guilty to seven counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and one count of making false official statements.

First Prominent Case Involved Capt. Wang

The case that first brought Spinner to prominence was that of Air Force Capt. Jim Wang. Wang was charged with dereliction of duty in an accidental, “friendly fire” shoot-down of two Black Hawk helicopters over Iraq that killed 26 people in April 1994. A military jury cleared him a year later.

Wang had never heard of Spinner but hired him on the recommendation of his military counsel.

“We weren’t after high profile,” Wang said in a recent telephone interview from his current duty station at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. “We were after an individual that knew the ins and outs.”

Wang says they were able to capitalize on good media relations. “I know that’s one of the things that he takes advantage of,” he says.

Spinner also makes good use of the military counsel assigned to his clients for preliminary work, including two lieutenant colonels in the Hale case. The availability of military counsel is one reason he does not have a large staff. The other is that he doesn’t want the headaches of running an office.

“I travel to the cases so I’m working out of their offices most of the time,” says Spinner. “I’m a strong team player. On occasion, some of my clients have said, ‘I’m not sure I trust my military lawyer. I may want to fire him.’ I say, ‘No, we’re a team.’ They know the local territory and the judges and the personalities at their base and in their offices.”

Spinner adds his own expertise. “I understand military juries. I understand military commanders. I know where the skeletons are buried in the military justice system.”

Military attorneys, alternating between service as defense counsel, prosecutors and judges, feel pressures that civilian lawyers do not, Spinner says.

“There is a certain reluctance to be too outspoken because you’re really part of the system,” he says. “There may be concerns about promotion, about my next assignment.”

Joseph E. Cazenavette, an attorney who worked with Spinner in the Air Force and who now practices civilian law in the same building, says when Spinner steps into a case the opposition gets uneasy.

“They know,” he says, “that when Frank enters the scene, it could be a high-profile case that will become media noise. They don’t like the light shining on them. They’ll go to any end to try to dispense with the case. . . . “

Why does he embrace the media?

Spinner says: “I see it as we’re waging a war. We’re fighting for my client in court but we’re fighting for my client’s reputation out of court.”

Helping with the media and with running his office when he is on the road--80,000 frequent-flier miles a year--is the youngest of his three daughters, Heather, 24, a finance major at George Mason University.

When he retired from the Air Force, he thought he would be playing golf. “My wife had a good income,” he says. “With her income and my retirement pay from the Air Force we’re in six digits. So what I’m making from my law practice is just gravy.”

Spinner believes he’s answering a calling. “If I were not doing what I’m doing now, I would probably be in some form of Christian lay work. . . . If God put me here to do this type of work, then he would bless my work. I believe that’s happened.”