Attorney Joseph A. Ball Dies; Played Key Warren Commission Role

Joseph A. Ball, one of the country’s most respected trial lawyers who was probably best known for his role as senior counsel on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, died Thursday at St. Mary’s Hospital in Long Beach. He was 97.

Ball, a longtime resident of Long Beach, had a courtroom career stretching more than half a century. During that time he defended such notorious clients as Watergate figure John D. Ehrlichman, auto maker John DeLorean and Saudi Arabian financier Adnan Khashoggi.

Called one of the leading American trial lawyers of his generation by the National Law Journal, Ball also helped draft the California Evidence Code and Tort Claims Act and played an important role in revising federal rules of criminal procedure.

Colleagues praised his gentle but effective courtroom style and ability to deliver eloquent arguments without notes.

“Joe Ball was the best trial lawyer in California in the 20th century,” said noted Los Angeles attorney Ronald L. Olson. “He was inspirational, brilliant. He almost had a spiritual quality about him and could evoke the imagination of those he was speaking to, whether jury, judge or counsel.”

Ball, the son of a doctor, was born in Stuart, Iowa, in 1902. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Nebraska’s Creighton University in 1925 and a law degree from USC in 1927.

He founded the law firm Ball, Hunt & Hart in 1946. Former Gov. Pat Brown, whose gubernatorial campaigns Ball chaired, joined the firm two decades later.

Brown, who died in 1996, twice offered to appoint Ball to the state Supreme Court but Ball turned him down.

“I like the practice of law,” Ball later said, “and I never wanted a life on the bench.”

Ball taught criminal law at four law schools, including USC, and was a former president of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the State Bar of California.

He once described trial work as “a terrific strain. You work like thunder, like preparing for an athletic event. You give up all of your outside activities for months. You get sick and tired, and you wonder, ‘Why did I take this case?’ And then, when the next one comes along, you take it.”

Although his Warren Commission role assured him a spot in history, Ball was proudest of two cases: a 1956 case in which he defended former county Supervisor Herbert Legg against charges of taking a $10,000 bribe from a trash hauler, and a 1970 trial in which he represented developer Keith Smith on charges of bribing four Los Angeles harbor commissioners. He won both cases.

During the 1960s and 1970s, he served on the advisory committee on federal criminal rules and the Committee to Revise the California Constitution.

He also was a member of the California Law Revision Commission, which produced the Evidence Code of California and the Tort Claims Act of California.

It was a massive undertaking that brought uniformity to many areas of evidence law, and Ball was “one of those who worked hardest at it,” said John McDonough, former executive secretary of the commission and Stanford University law professor who later became one of Ball’s law partners.

Ball also found hard work when he reported for duty as counsel to the Warren Commission. Chosen by Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had known Ball from California political circles, Ball and another lawyer, David Belin, were assigned to determine the identity of Kennedy’s assassin.

About 10,000 pieces of paper were rolled into his office, including reports from the FBI, the Dallas police and sheriff, and the CIA. He and Belin spent their first month organizing the information and cataloging it on index cards. He later proposed procedures used by the entire staff, including field investigations and oral interrogation of key witnesses.

Ball wrote most of the controversial report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the shooting of the president. He took the report to the chief justice.

The report was assailed by critics and fueled conspiracy theories that continue to be debated today. Ball rejected them all.

“Give me 30 minutes of uninterrupted time with someone of a fair mind,” he said, “and I will convince him our findings were correct.”

He characterized conspiracy theories as “half-baked arguments from dishonest critics” that failed to produce any new evidence.

During the Watergate scandal, Ball was West Coast counsel for Ehrlichman, the Nixon aide who was charged with conspiring to violate the civil rights of Dr. Lewis Fielding, the Beverly Hills psychiatrist of “Pentagon Papers” figure Daniel Ellsberg, and of perjuring himself when he denied prior knowledge of a June 1973 break-in at Lewis’ office.

Ehrlichman was convicted in 1974 on the conspiracy charge and on three counts of making a false statement to a grand jury in connection with the Fielding break-in. He served 18 months in prison.

In 1980, Ball battled another courtroom heavyweight, Marvin Mitchelson, in the $2.5-billion divorce suit of Soraya Khashoggi against financier and arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. It was the largest divorce action on record at the time.

The lawsuit, which produced many salacious allegations, including one that Adnan Khashoggi ran a bordello in New York, was settled out of court in 1982, but the terms were not made public.

In 1983 Ball represented another notorious figure, auto maker DeLorean, against charges of conspiring to possess and distribute cocaine and heroin. DeLorean was acquitted on all counts in 1984.

In 1984 the American Bar Assn. established the Joseph A. Ball Fund to honor outstanding lawyers and support public service and education programs of the ABA. He also was a recipient in 1987 of the Long Beach Torch of Liberty Award by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Ball is survived by his daughter, JoEllen, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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