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Jeffrey MacDonald’s Main Lawyer, Bernie Segal, Passes Away
Jeffrey MacDonald’s Main Lawyer, Bernie Segal, Passes Away
I first met Bernie Segal in the winter of 1978 in Washington, D.C. at an oral argument involving Jeffrey MacDonald before the United Supreme Court. Since the early days of 1970, not long after first being accused by the United States Army of murder, he had been at MacDonald’s side, winning the Article 32 Hearing in the summer of 1970 that initially cleared MacDonald. Then, there came the Federal Grand Jury deliberations in the late summer, fall and winter of 1974, culminating in an Indictment for three counts of murder in February, 1975. Finally there were four years of appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and ultimately the Supreme Court.
Then, there was the summer of 1979. That is when all hell broke loose, and for seven weeks, beginning in mid July, there was a packed federal courtroom every day while something close to a war took place between Jeffrey MacDonald, Bernie Segal and Wade Smith and the federal government, represented largely by Brian Murtagh, a Justice Department lawyer, on loan from Washington, and myself.
Through it all, there was Bernie Segal, absolutely larger than life. He was smart, diligent, tenacious, taking no prisoners, and fully confident in the rightness of his cause. He never quit, and he had trouble leaving witnesses alone without hours of questioning. Indeed, Judge Franklin Dupree, the presiding federal judge, said at a local luncheon for the Wake County Bar that summer, that “Bernie Segal was the only lawyer he knew who could cross examine a witness for three days in an uncontested divorce case.”
Bernie’s client did not win that summer. Jeffrey MacDonald was convicted on all counts of murder and is still in federal prison in Maryland. But Bernie’s legal career went beyond that one case. He was a law professor for years at Golden State University in San Francisco and, I am sure, taught hundreds of law students how to better practice law on behalf of their clients.
I had neither spoken with or seen Bernie in years. But I remember him well. He was a passionate advocate for his client. And to me personally, he was fair.
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Jeffrey MacDonald, Wade Smith and Me
Jeffrey MacDonald, Wade Smith and Me
In the summer of 2004, the 25th anniversary of the federal prosecution and conviction of Jeffrey MacDonald for the murder of his pregnant wife and two small daughters, Jim Heavner, the owner of WCHL, the flagship radio station of Chapel Hill, conducted a wide ranging three part interview with Wade Smith, one of MacDonald’s defense attorneys and also later one of my defense attorneys, and myself. During the middle hour of the interview, we talked in detail about the MacDonald trial.
Now, we are putting portions of that interview, unedited and just as it was then done, on my website which is www.blackburnseminars.com. If you go to the home page and scroll to the bottom middle, you can click on and just listen. You don’t need a special device, just the ability to click. In coming days we will have more of the interview, but for now, there is a very interesting several minute clip.
Some of you may not know, but at the end of the trial, during the time of the closing arguments, Wade, who was supposed to be the closer for his side and make the last argument for about an hour, never got the chance to really speak. That is because the other defense attorney, Bernie Segal of California, took three hours and fourteen minutes for his argument, leaving Wade just sixty seconds to argue his points to the jury.
I was worried that the Court might give Wade more time, and so perhaps as a preemptive move, I offered Wade ten minutes of my time, which he took. During the entire defense argument to the jury, this was the quietest the courtroom ever got. In the book Fatal Vision, Joe McGinniss quotes a juror as saying “perhaps if Mr. Smith had spoken more”. But he didn’t, and we will never know.
Wade and I talk about this moment in the clip on my website. You can hear his own personal thoughts about that time, now long ago, but still fresh in memory. And, you will hear me say it might have made a difference.
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What If You Lived Your Life This Way…
What if You Lived Your Life This Way…
· Humility – there is a temptation for a person to believe that he or she has all the answers, and the world is just waiting. I have found that the most attractive quality in a person is humility, and the ability to listen and learn from others. What makes a person the most attractive is the willingness to just listen.
· Self-Confidence (quietly) – this may seem like a contradiction to the above, but actually it should go along with humility. A quiet self-confidence in one’s self is critical. Don’t say you can’t do something because you are afraid. Try. Even if you fail, you will learn from that.
· Learn to Say No – when something does not feel right, do not do it. Do not cut corners. Do not say you will do something and then not do it. If you don’t think you should or can, then walk away.
· Learn to Follow Through and Keep your Promises – If you commit to doing something, then do it. And when you said you would. Always. If you do this, you can be successful. If not, you have no chance.
· Be truthful – there is no such thing as a “little white lie”. They can so easily grow into big ones, and once you go down that path, it is very difficult to come back.
· Do Not Over Commit – don’t think you can be a super-person. Act within yourself and agree only to do what is possible, and then work so hard to finish what you have started.
· Find your Passion in Life – everyone has a passion. Too many people don’t follow what is their own passion. You only have one life. Do what makes you happy and content, without regard to how much money is involved. Don’t let the acquisition of money and things run your life. Live your life in technicolor, not in black and white. If it takes some time to find your passion, keep at it.
· Sense of Humor – I could not live without this, and I doubt you can either. It is one of the most critical traits a person can have.
· Never Ever Give Up – Winston Churchill was the one most famous for saying this. He said it a very dark time in his country’s life. The words are still true today.
· Financial Self Control – live and work within your means. Don’t go too much into debt. Doing so will rob you of the passion in your life. It will take away any chance of real happiness. Don’t spend your life seeing how many material things you can acquire. But if you must acquire something, try friendships.
· Mistakes (serious ones) – they will follow you the rest of your life. You will never get rid of them. So avoid moral or legal mistakes. The price is too high.
· Kindness – “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” Plato
· Grace – it has often been defined as “something we get that we don’t deserve”. Recognize this and accept and embrace it.
· Faith – at some point, for almost everyone, faith is the one constant and compass that you must have to live a good and successful life.
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You Want to Cook?
You Want to Cook?
It was early 2006, and I had just moved into a new townhome in Raleigh, not far from Cameron Village. The place was owned by a friend of mine from college, whom I had met when I was a sophomore at Wake Forest, and she was a freshman from Raleigh. Susie, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, has a twin sister Stella who lives now in Greensboro, North Carolina. The two of them, through a corporation set up by their late father, own the townhome, and knowing I was looking for some place new to live, offered it to me.
During the first visit, I turned on the lights to see if the power was on, and that everything worked. All was fine but the stove. I turned every knob and pushed every button…and nothing. So I emailed Susie and told her the stove didn’t work. Her response was immediate. “You want to cook? Jim, I have known you since I was seventeen years old, and I know you can’t cook. So why do you care if the stove doesn’t work”?
Of course, the problem was simple. The power switch was in a different location from all the others, and it was off. It took someone professional to tell me that.
Fast forward five years. I am still here and still learning how to cook. I have learned what vegetable oil is and where to find it at the grocery store. I have learned the word “sauté”, but wonder why they don’t just say “cook and stir quickly in a pan”? I have some successes, such as lemon chicken, a great recipe sent to me from California years ago by my daughter Stacy. Of course the only thing lemon about it is that you squirt some on it at the very end.
Then, there were the failures.
The first time I ever tried ribs on the grill that is what I did. No one ever said put them first in the oven. I still remember I had never seen that color of black when I took them off the grill. It is always awkward to eat something that looks bad, tastes the same way, and still try to pretend how good it is and only needs a bit of tweaking. What it needed was being thrown away.
So I bought a cook book, The Pioneer Woman Cooks. Even though I am no longer a small child, I still like books with lots of pictures in them, and this book has them every step of the way. Cook books with pictures will make you smile.
Then there was the movie “Julia & Julia”. Julia (the other one) kept making Boeuf Bourguignon like it was nothing. So I thought, how hard can this be? Well…it took most of Saturday to buy a Dutch oven that was less than $70.00. Then, after reading the recipe directions via Google, I saw there were 45 steps to it.
Step 1 read “First prepare the bacon: cut off the rind and reserve”. I had no idea what any of this meant. But then Step 2 said in part “Cut the bacon into lardons”. Step 3 called for “Simmer the rind and the lardons for ten minutes”, and Step 4 said “Drain and dry the lardons and rind and reserve”. Mercifully, Step 5 read “Pre-heat the oven to 450 F”.
There were still 40 steps left. One day later, it was done, and so was I. While this recipe is very good, I would not recommend it for the fainthearted.
I am still learning which is the real reason for this new blog. Last Sunday a friend of mine called mid afternoon and said she was thinking of having some folks to her house and cook vegetables and have some wine for a few friends. She specifically mentioned squash casserole. Just as I was getting ready to say “I can be there”, she told me she had decided not to do it at all.
Have you ever had some food idea on your mind and can’t get rid of it? That has been me all week. I have just been thinking how good squash casserole would be. But how to do it? Where can I find a recipe? The Pioneer Woman didn’t help too much but on Google, I found Paula Dean. But her recipe calls for both squash and zucchini. This troubled me, so at lunch on Sunday, I asked another friend, who was treating me at Winston’s, why would you use zucchini for squash casserole? “Jim, zucchini is squash…it just isn’t yellow. You can use zucchini. It will still be squash casserole”.
The adventure continues.
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Thoughts about People Behaving Badly
Thoughts on People Behaving Badly
Three years ago this Labor Day, John Drescher, the Senior Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, called and said he wanted to write a Sunday newspaper column about me and asked specifically if I would be willing to give any personal advice on former Senator John Edwards. I was driving at the time and almost wrecked the car. As politely as I could, I declined his invitation. Mr. Drescher went on to write a column anyway, but it was sort of vanilla, because I did not directly answer his questions as to what John Edwards, or any person who has either fallen from grace or is in the process of doing so, should do.
Now, three years later, I still resist giving anyone specific advice, unless that person asks, and I can assure you, no one has asked. At the same time, as I have continued, probably like you, to watch public lives and careers implode, I am struck by how often these people do not understand the wisdom of Robert Frost’s great line, that “the best way out is always through”.
Please understand that I am a late follower of this advice, and indeed if I had personally followed such thoughts sooner in my own life, my career as a lawyer might very well have turned out differently. At the very least, it would not have been any worse.
1993 was my year of coming out. That is the year when my mistakes and real errors in judgment became public knowledge. While late January of that year saw many newspaper and television stories about me published, I made no public comments. I hunkered down, stayed at home went for long solitary walks, and talked often with my lawyers in Raleigh and psychiatrist in Durham. It took me almost the entire year to fully appreciate and accept the consequences of my own actions, so I know first – hand how difficult that is for anyone.
The best advice I ever got was made not by any lawyer or psychiatrist, but by Rick Gammon’s paralegal, who told all of us how dumb we were in not telling the entire story immediately and all at once. “Just get it out and do it now” is what she said. “And…tell the truth…all of it”
Finally, I did that and have always been glad I did. I only wish I had done it sooner. I wish it had not taken me almost the entire year. Still, I have always believed, and believe today, that it is tough for people to tell the truth, when that truth is adverse to what we want people to know about us, and we do not know the ultimate consequences of that truth telling. But here is the deal. The truth is likely to come out anyway, and it is far better to tell it yourself rather than have someone else do so.
You should not need a public relations person to tell you what to say. You are the only one who knows the real truth. Telling it just washes everything else away. Sure, there will be consequences, and some of them might not be pleasant. But as surely as night follows day, it is the only way out, and the only way back. You just have to have faith, and as one of my good friends has said, “Faith to let the flower bloom”.
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Marketing 101 with Wade Smith
Marketing 101 with Wade Smith
Earlier this week, I was at the 42nd Street Oyster Bar with some friends, and in walked Wade Smith, carrying a book, ready to eat dinner by himself at the Bar. Instead, he saw us and joined us for about an hour. Towards the end of the conversation, after hearing one of the participants tell him how much her daughter liked his nephew, Roger Smith, Jr., and what a good job he did in representing her, Wade told a story about marketing.
Some time ago, the State Bar asked him and nine other lawyers to make a six minute presentation at the Bar Center in Cary. It was to be a one hour CLE presentation on marketing. Wade was the last to speak.
While waiting his turn, he became alarmed as lawyer after lawyer stood up with a fancy video or power point presentation. Wade had none of those. Finally, it was his turn, and as he reached the podium, he decided to tell the audience the truth…that he really had not much to say and certainly no formal presentation by video.
Wade just leaned forward and said that the philosophy he and his firm had was to treat every client as though he or she was the most important one the firm had, and if the case went to court or a jury trial, to make sure that every person in the courtroom, including the members of the jury, would want to hire him or his law firm if that person ever needed legal representation. And…each member of the firm tried hard to return every phone call and every email as quickly as possible.
Finally, he told the story of his grandfather who had no formal education, and could neither read nor write. Before he made a closing argument to a judge or jury, Wade said he went somewhere by himself and sat quietly for a few minutes, gathering his thoughts, and telling his grandfather, this argument was for him. That way, he was sure he would be doing his best.
That is marketing.
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Writing an Afterword
Writing an Afterword
You would think it is not too tough to write a brief Afterword to a book you wrote some years ago. It doesn’t have to be too long. In fact, the representative of the printing company I use, Sheridan Printing Company, located in Michigan, said 3,000 words would be just about right. At approximately 300 words a page, that is only about 10 pages, and my book was just over 200 pages. So, I knew I could whip this out in no time.
I sat down at the computer and began to start…nothing came…nothing. I had not figured out what to say. My book, Flame-Out, From Prosecuting Jeffrey MacDonald to Serving Time to Serving Tables, was first published in 2000, and though it has been through a total of three printings, it still had been over ten years since I last put pen to paper and talked about the life changing events that had taken place in my life some years before.
I had no plan. So writing any words, much less 3,000 was going to be difficult. I got up from the computer, shut it down, and just tried to think what was the purpose of an Afterword any way. Why do people write them in books that are old? I knew the immediate answer to that. A new Afterword gives the book a new life, new relevancy, and maybe someone will buy it. But, still about what?
Slowly, it came to me that I needed to write about some of the people I have met these last years while making speeches and holding seminars about life, ethics, issues of mental health and just surviving adversity. I wanted to write about someone other than myself. I wanted to tell other peoples’ stories. As I started writing again, it came easily to me. I remembered a young lady, who is no longer here, and the ravages of depression and mental illness, the mother whose daughter was in a terrible car accident but lived, though she no longer speaks and has not done so since December, 1993, the young teenage boys, standing in front of a sentencing Judge on charges of under age drinking and stuggling to tell the truth, and of course the wisdom I learned not that long ago from the writings of Robert Frost, that “the shortest way out is through”.
I finished the Afterword. It soon will be printed and published. But it isn’t 3,000 words. It is over 4,000.
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Grandmother Rule on Ethics
Grandmother Rule on Ethics
Sometimes a person says something during one of my Continuing Legal Education programs that just nails it. I can spend hours talking with people about legal or business ethics, and then someone listening to me just makes a comment that captures all of what I am trying to say in a few sentences, and often much better than I am then trying to do.
That happened to me yesterday in Winston-Salem, when an old friend and successful trial lawyer was recounting some advice one of his mentors and law partners once said to him.
“I can tell you all you need to know about ethics in one good sentence, and how to never get in any trouble with the Bar or your clients or really anyone”, the mentor once told my friend.
“What are you saying”, my friend asked.
“Just follow this simple rule…before you do anything at all that gives you some pause before doing it, ask yourself this question… ‘would your grandmother approve of what you are about to do?’ If she would, then go ahead. If she would not, don’t go near it, and for goodness sakes, don’t do it. If you follow this advice, you won’t have to worry about reading any rules or regulations or guidelines. Ever. The best rule is to ask “would your grandmother approve”.
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Stigma of Bi-Polar Takes a Hit
Stigma of Bi-Polar takes a Hit
In this week’s edition of People magazine, the well known actress, Catherine Zeta Jones, made public that in April of this year, she had checked into a mental health clinic in Connecticut and subsequently been given a diagnosis of Bi-Polar II, which consists of times of depression and episodes of mild mania.
Another actress this week, Demi Lovata, said that while she did not know Ms. Jones, her actions in making her story public was “so brave…and so difficult”.
And so it is, and that is part of the problem. Catherine Zeta Jones said there were millions of Americans suffering from this illness, and she was just one of them.
I know from the many talks and seminars I present, that a number of people, attorneys and paralegals, as well as their friends and families, suffer from all sorts of depression. Some seek help, including therapy and medication. Others do not. One reason people are hesitant to seek help is that they are concerned about what others may think of them. They are embarrassed. They do not want to admit, even to themselves, they are not well. And so they pretend…and often the illness gets worse, depriving them of living happier and more productive lives.
Long ago, when it was first suggested to me that I see a doctor (psychiatrist), I resisted, even breaking my first appointment. I was admitted to Duke Hospital for a week and subsequently got a diagnosis, in part, somewhat similar.
If you have ever come to one of my programs, you know that I speak pretty freely about this time in my life. It has been helpful to me to continue to do so. But it took a long time for me to get to that point. It was not easy.
Only when it becomes easier for people… only when it is not seen as “brave and courageous” will we have really begun to fight back against the illness of depression and its cousin…being bipolar.
It will be very nice when one day I can ask a group of people if they would be willing to seek help for mental issues they might be having, and they all raise their hands and say “yes”. Until then, I applaud those people, well known, who are willing to make their lives public in this way.
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Rags
Rags
Last Tuesday evening, before I drove to Charlotte for a Continuing Education program on early Wednesday morning, I stopped by the gas station at Five Points in Raleigh, my usual filling up place. After pumping gas, I slowly began to drive off when I saw this fellow stooped down beside his car, checking the air in his tires.
Keeping my car running, I got out and walked over to him. He stood up, smiled and gave me a big Hi-Five, and asked if I remembered him. His first words were “It’s been a long time…sixteen years.” I smiled back and said yes it had, and how was he doing.
I don’t know his real name, only the name he wanted everyone to know him by…”Rags”. I had met him during the early winter of 1994, at Wake Correctional in Raleigh, where both he and I were serving time. We were in the same dorm, though he was on the other side. We really never spoke much until early one morning as I was getting ready to leave for work release in Robert Morgan’s law office, he stopped me and said he had hurt his left hand very badly the day before in an accident while on work release himself.
Rags was going to the prison doctor that day but wanted a second opinion by someone in private practice and asked if I knew anyone. Because my son Jeff had had a previous hand and wrist accident, I did know someone who was a Raleigh specialist in such matters, and so I gave him his name and told him to look the information up in the phone book. That’s all I did. It couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes at most.
Rags took my advice, went to see the specialist I had mentioned, and his hand was saved, eventually as good as new. He had not thought he would ever be able to use it properly again, which bothered him as he wanted to be an electrician one day. My last day at Wake Correctional, Rags came up to me, and using his now repaired left hand, signed his name to a yellow pad I was carrying. And he said “thanks”.
At my first book signing at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, there were lots of people, friends I had known for years, some lawyers and many professional people. And there was Rags, standing in line with others, waiting to buy his copy of my book.
The last thing Rags said to me last week was “Sixteen years…I’ve been a good boy. I am never going back”. Rags is now a successful Raleigh electrician.
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