Sheldon Otis, 69; Lawyer Defended Radicals

Sheldon Otis, a criminal defense lawyer who waged courtroom battles for some of the 1970s’ most prominent radicals, including Angela Davis and Huey Newton, died of congestive heart failure March 1 at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. He was 69.

He was the lead defense attorney for Steven Soliah, an associate of the Symbionese Liberation Army who was acquitted in 1976 at trial over a Carmichael, Calif., bank robbery that left a woman dead.

Soliah was the only person tried in the 1970s for the robbery, which resulted in the fatal shooting of a bank customer, Myrna Opsahl. The case was resurrected recently with the arrests on first-degree murder charges of three other former SLA members and Soliah’s sister, Sara Jane Olson.

Although in declining health since undergoing quadruple heart bypass surgery several years ago, Otis was intrigued by the new developments in the 1975 case.

“There’s definitely a mood of antagonism against anyone that they can label as a terrorist,” he told The Times in January after the arrests of Olson, Emily Harris, William Harris and Michael Bortin.

Otis was a Detroit native and graduate of Wayne State University, where he earned his law degree. He quickly became a top member of Detroit’s defense bar, racking up acquittals in more than 20 cases.

In 1971, a year after moving to Berkeley for a job with the Legal Aid Society in San Mateo County, he joined the Angela Davis defense team. The black militant had been charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in a 1970 shootout in which four people, including a judge, were killed. Otis helped to organize the case and gave the arguments on some early defense motions.

“His help in the case was fantastic. He was a very brilliant lawyer,” said Howard R. Moore Jr., who led the Davis defense.

Davis was acquitted in June 1972.

In the late 1970s, Otis helped to negotiate Newton’s return from self-imposed exile in Cuba to face murder charges stemming from the 1974 shooting of an Oakland prostitute. Otis left the case in 1978 before it went to trial. The Black Panther leader, who went through two mistrials in the case, was killed in a street shooting in 1989.

In 1976, Otis represented Soliah, who had lived with Patricia Hearst while she was an SLA fugitive. Otis was able to persuade a federal jury that Soliah was innocent despite the testimony of two bank employees who had identified him as one of four robbers who had stormed the bank.

Otis credited his successful defense in part to long hours of practice in a mock courtroom he installed in the basement of his Victorian-style office building in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights district.

“I don’t believe a lawyer wins a case, although a lawyer can blow a case,” Otis, considered a master of courtroom technique, once told the Washington Post.

He used the mock courtroom to hone the skills of his younger associates, videotaping them to make them aware of weaknesses in their presentation. He also put witnesses through their paces there, rehearsing questioning to help them avoid potentially harmful mannerisms, such as failing to look the jury in the eye.

He is survived by a daughter, Dana Otis-Heirich, of Palo Alto; a son, Michael, of Sacramento; and two granddaughters.