Carl E. Jones, 68; Criminal Defense Lawyer Won Many High-Profile Murder Cases

Carl E. Jones, a highly regarded Los Angeles criminal defense attorney who won a number of high-profile murder acquittals, has died. He was 68.

Jones, who retired in 1999, died of a heart attack March 20 at his home in Woodstock, Md., said his ex-wife, Cissy Jones.

“He was a brilliant lawyer, a brilliant tactician and strategist,” said Patrick Dixon, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, who tried at least three murder cases against Jones.

“He’s really one of the top handful of lawyers I’ve ever tried against, and I’ve been in the office 30 years,” Dixon said.

In 1983, Jones left his successful 16-year criminal-defense practice to head the Alternate Defense Counsel, a private, nonprofit law firm that contracted with Los Angeles County to provide services for indigent criminal defendants when a public defender was unavailable or had a conflict of interest.

“He was an extraordinary and accomplished criminal defense lawyer,” said Fritzie Galliani, a former executive director of the Alternate Defense Counsel, which was replaced by the county’s alternate public defender’s office in the mid-1990s.

“The thing that stood out about his tenure there was that he not only directed the program, but he also worked actively as a trial attorney, and he handled a number of death-penalty cases, even while he was administrator of the program,” Galliani said.

After leaving the Alternate Defense Counsel in 1988, Jones returned to private practice in Pasadena.

In the mid-’70s, Jones’ exceptional courtroom abilities drew the attention of the Board of Supervisors after he won 17 murder acquittals in a row. His string of victories caused one supervisor to introduce a motion to have Jones investigated “to see whether or not the district attorney’s office worked as hard against me as they did against other defense lawyers,” Jones said jokingly in a 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Sentinel.

When lawyers were legally able to advertise more than two decades ago, Jones took out an ad in the Sentinel, a newspaper serving the black community, that listed all of his murder acquittals, Galliani said.

“He was able to speak the language of the average man, with a compelling sense of belief and sincerity,” said criminal defense attorney Joel Isaacson, who was co-counsel with Jones on a number of high-profile cases.

Among them was the 1992 acquittal of Harvey Rader, a former Reseda car dealer charged with the murder of four members of a Northridge family who disappeared in 1982.

Jones and Isaacson also won a 1989 acquittal for Fred “Fat Fred” Knight, one of three gang members charged with fatally shooting five teenagers in the so-called 54th Street Massacre, which authorities called one of the worst incidents of gang violence in Los Angeles history.

“He just had an uncanny ability to size up a person or situation accurately and then be able to portray that to a jury,” said Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard P. Neidorf, who presided over several cases handled by Jones, including the Knight case, in which Jones’ sense of humor came into play.

Jones was interviewing a witness when he noticed that one juror had nodded off.

“He picked up a giant law book and slammed it down, saying [to the witness], ‘Is that how loud Mr. So and So was talking?’ ” Neidorf said. “The whole room reverberated. It woke up the juror, and he never fell asleep again. I knew what [Jones] was doing, and the jurors who were awake were smiling and chuckling.”

Jones also represented Lorenzo Newborn, one of three adult gang members charged with ambushing and fatally shooting three teenage boys in Pasadena on Halloween night 1993. But Jones was unsuccessful in defending Newborn: All three defendants, who prosecutors said were determined to avenge an earlier killing and mistook the victims for gang rivals, were convicted and sentenced to death.

During the O.J. Simpson case, Jones represented Simpson’s adult son, Jason, and Simpson’s first wife, Marquerite Simpson Thomas, when they were interviewed by police and prosecutors.

He also represented Rosa Lopez, a Salvadoran housekeeper who lived and worked next door to Simpson. Lopez testified that she had seen Simpson’s white Ford Bronco parked outside his house and that it had remained there the night that his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman were slain.

Jones was born Jan. 19, 1938, in Houston. In 1944, his family moved to Watts and then Compton, where Jones graduated from Centennial High School in 1955.

Jones, who served briefly in the Navy, graduated from Compton College in 1960.

Six years later, he graduated from Southwestern University School of Law, having participated in a program that allowed students to attend the law school without a bachelor’s degree. He passed the bar exam in 1967.

“It’s the end of an era with Carl’s passing,” said Maya Hamburger, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney who took over Jones’ law practice in 1998.

“It was not by chance that he and Johnnie Cochran were buddies for over 30 years,” Hamburger said. “They had the same kind of mind-set -- that everybody is entitled to a defense, with a capital D, under the U.S. and California constitutions.”

In the ‘70s, Jones was president of the Langston Law Club, an African American legal society. In 1993, he won the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Assn.’s Joseph Rosen Justice Award for career achievement.

Jones, who was divorced three times, is survived by nine children, Carl Jr., Carlyne, Jeffrey, Kenny, Larry, William Shelby, Teri Williams, Jerrett, and Carla; 23 grandchildren; a brother, Johnny; and a sister, Judy Faniel.

A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. Friday at Little Zion Missionary Baptist Church, 2408 N. Wilmington Ave., Compton. A repast will follow at 12:30 p.m. at B.B. King’s Blues Club at Universal CityWalk in Universal City.