* William Greene; Attorney, Advocate for the Disabled

William S. Greene, 78, a Los Angeles attorney and advocate for the disabled who wrote a guidebook on state law as it applied to the developmentally disabled. Born in Toronto, Greene moved to Southern California as a young man and worked as an educator in the Oxnard area. In the late 1960s, he decided to become a lawyer, passing the bar in 1969. During the 1970s, he became an advocate for the disabled, a cause he championed throughout his life, in large part because one of his two sons was developmentally challenged. He was an active volunteer, helping to sort out legal issues at regional centers for the disabled in the Valley. In 1976, he self-published the guidebook “Prison Is Not for Me,” which discusses legal options for the disabled in court. In 1977, he filed a court brief before the state Supreme Court, noting that a 1973 law dealing with mentally retarded defendants in criminal cases was being largely ignored. In the 1980s, Greene started a company called Biography and, for a time, found work writing biographies for people not generally in the news. He pursued his law practice until weeks before his death. On Nov. 12 of heart failure.