George Davis, 98; Attorney Railed Against Death Penalty

George T. Davis, a legendary San Francisco criminal lawyer who first gained fame representing a convicted bomber who was pardoned in a landmark 1930s case and later represented clients including California death row inmate Caryl Chessman and televangelist Jim Bakker, has died. He was 98.

Davis died of heart failure Feb. 4 at his home at the Mauna Lani Resort on the Big Island of Hawaii, said his wife, Ginger.

“George really was one of the great ones,” Gerald Uelmen, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, told The Times on Friday. “He was a legendary voice against capital punishment in California, one of the earliest lawyers who really focused on death cases and challenged the employment of the death penalty in California.”

“My memory of George was that he was a very outgoing person,” Uelmen added. “People liked him a lot, and he just loved to tell war stories.”

Davis had no shortage of them.

A 1931 graduate of UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, he worked for a year as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco before launching his solo practice as a criminal lawyer.

By decade’s end he had gained a national reputation for handling appeals on behalf of labor organizer Tom Mooney, who had been convicted of a 1916 parade bombing in San Francisco that killed 10 people and injured 40.

The controversial case, in which it was widely believed that Mooney had been framed through perjured testimony, produced a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision liberalizing the rules under which new evidence could be introduced as grounds for a new trial.

When Mooney was granted an unconditional pardon in 1939 after more than 21 years in prison, he and Davis staged a victory parade up Market Street in San Francisco, where they were cheered by an estimated 100,000 lining the street.

After serving in the Army in Europe during World War II, Davis represented Alfried Krupp, heir to the German industrial and munitions empire, in post-Nuremberg trials appeals.

Davis managed to get Krupp’s prison term cut in half, arguing that Krupp was being tried for war crimes in place of his father, who had headed the firm under Nazi rule but had been declared mentally unfit to be tried. Davis ultimately helped Krupp get released from prison.

In another landmark case, in 1948, Davis defended Air Force Sgt. Kenneth Long, who was charged with murdering his unfaithful wife.

Long had already confessed on the witness stand, but the jury heard a different story when Davis persuaded the judge to admit -- for the first time in California -- a tape-recording as evidence.

Davis had smuggled a recorder into the jail and secretly recorded a conversation between Long and a psychiatrist. During the conversation, Long, who had been injected with sodium pentothal, the chemical commonly known as truth serum, recalled witnessing his wife’s boyfriend kill her.

The jury found Long not guilty.

A 1956 episode of the hour-long ABC anthology series “Conflict” featured an episode based on the Long case: “The People Against McQuade,” featuring Tab Hunter and James Garner -- and Davis playing himself as the defendant’s lawyer.

“He was open to everything,” Ginger Davis said of her husband’s brief fling in Hollywood. “George was such a happy person; he just always had a good time and loved meeting all those people.”

Davis’ most notorious case -- and one of his greatest war stories -- was the federal death penalty appeal of Chessman, the so-called Red Light Bandit, who was convicted on kidnapping and rape charges in 1948.

After a 12-year struggle for his life on San Quentin’s death row, during which he wrote books protesting his conviction and won numerous stays of execution, Chessman was scheduled to die in the gas chamber at 10 a.m. May 2, 1960.

In the wake of what a Los Angeles Times correspondent described as a “whirlwind series of legal maneuvers,” Davis and fellow attorney Rosalie Asher rushed into the chambers of federal Judge Louis Goodman in San Francisco only a few minutes before the scheduled execution.

The judge listened briefly to their plea for a stay. Then, agreeing to a one-hour stay to hear arguments, the judge reached for the phone. But the judge’s secretary obtained a wrong number for the prison warden on the first try, and by the second try it was too late.

“If ever there was a case proving the injustice of the death penalty, it was the Chessman case,” Davis said in an interview years later. “Why, he hadn’t even been accused of killing anybody.”

Chessman had been convicted under California’s Lindbergh Law, which permitted the death penalty to be invoked when kidnapping victims suffered bodily harm. The law was repealed in 1973.

Among Davis’ other clients were Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino Jr., for whom Davis secured release from prison in Manila; and Robert W. T’Souvas, who was charged with killing two Vietnamese children during the My Lai massacre; Davis got the charges dismissed.

Davis’ last big case was in 1989, when he represented Bakker, who was convicted on 24 counts of conspiring to defraud his followers.

Davis was born May 29, 1907, in St. Louis but at age 1 moved with his family to San Francisco, where his Greek-immigrant father managed restaurants.

Davis, who played drums, trumpet and piano, joined the local musicians union while studying philosophy at UC Berkeley. Between his sophomore and junior years, he and four musician friends got a job playing on a cruise ship.

During the around-the-world cruise, on which he celebrated his 18th birthday, Davis made his first visit to Hawaii. He and Ginger, his fourth wife, moved to the islands permanently in 1980 and bought a 100-acre horse and cattle ranch on the Hamakua Coast on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Davis served as Northern California campaign chairman for Harry S. Truman in 1948 and was Northern California campaign co-chairman for Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Through four mayoral administrations, he was a member of the San Francisco War Memorial Commission, which overseas the opera house and other arts facilities in the civic center, and the San Francisco Host Committee, which entertains visiting heads of state.

With J.K. Choy, Davis co-founded the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco in 1965. He also was a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild and the American Board of Criminal Lawyers.

Davis, who was twice divorced and widowed once, had no children. Ginger Davis, whom he married in 1974, is his sole survivor.

A memorial service will be private.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Death Penalty Clinic of Boalt Hall School of Law.