For the first 89 years of this country’s existence, no woman was ever executed for any crime. Then along came Mary Surratt.

Mary Surratt and Thomas Jones never knew one another, but they both knew the actor John Wilkes Booth. In downtown Washington, Mary ran a modest boarding house where Booth hung out with Mary’s son John and other theater cronies. Thomas Jones lived a day’s ride away. The last anyone heard from Jones, he had a cheap booth on the midway at the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair, where he hawked his seedy book about how he helped Booth hide out in the woods after the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

Twenty-seven years after the assassination, Thomas crawled out from under a rock to try to cash in on his brush with infamy. Folks at the World’s Fair didn’t take kindly to Tom’s work. A newspaper column outlined briefly how angry veterans of the Army of the Republic trashed all the books. It seems Thomas didn’t die from his beating, but after openly selling his tale as an accessory to the most infamous murder in U.S. history, Thomas Jones did disappear. Laying low suited him best.

At Mary Surratt’s boarding house, they didn’t like Lincoln much and they spoke their minds freely, as they were permitted to do in these United States. Booth’s buddies drank a lot, and made noise about kidnapping the President; and then a few of them changed course and set out instead to kill him, the Vice President and the Secretary of State. Everyone testified later that Mary had nothing bad to say about the President. Minding her own business, she cleaned house and always had a pot of stew on for her son’s friends. The only witness who could recallnMary saying anything was certain she had nothing to do with Booth’s plot.

As it unfolded, the killer assigned to Vice President Andrew Johnson got cold feet and ran; Secretary of State Seward and his family were slashed viciously in a bloody knife attack that left two dead and Seward barely alive. At about the same time, at Ford’s Theater, hundreds heard a gunshot and then saw John Wilkes Booth leap from the second floor box to the stage below. Outside, Ed Spangler held Booth’s horse like he’d been told.

As alarm spread rapidly with the news, Booth galloped south into the night and across the bridge into Maryland. Hours later and far from the city, Booth woke up Dr. Mudd, a country doctor friendly to Southern boys, to set the leg bone Booth broke in his jump to the stage. When the good doctor threw Booth out the next morning, suspecting who he was, the assassin stumbled in the woods upon a local named Thomas Jones. It was Thomas who hid Booth away for the next week, bringing him his daily bread with news of the manhunt.

Then, when the coast was clear, Thomas rowed the killer across the river to Virginia, so he could continue his escape to the south. But the cavalry wasn’t far behind. They got wind of Booth, cornered him in a barn, burned it down and shot him dead for the reward. Before the frenzied hunt for accomplices, aiders and abettors, Booth’s friends scattered. Thomas Jones stayed quiet; John Surratt fled to Europe; his mother Mary stayed at home. To “aid” is to give any kind of support or information. To “abet” is to encourage. Any assistance makes you an accessory. You can be on the wrong side of the law if you know anything and keep it quiet. The U.S. Criminal Code calls it “guilty knowledge.” Aiders and abettors and accessories floated around Lincoln’s murder as they do around most big crimes, because we know how difficult it is to move through modern times completely alone.

Eight of Booth’s associates were tried and found guilty of conspiracy, including Ed Spangler and Dr. Mudd. Four of the eight were hanged, including Mary Surratt. Denying the court’s recommendation of leniency for Mary, President Johnson said simply “she kept the nest that hatched the egg.” President Kennedy was murdered in 1963. They are out there still: accomplices, aiders, abettors and accessories of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, witnesses with guilty knowledge… many identified by researchers and many not.

So we wait for the next Thomas Jones. He’s been hiding under his rock long enough. He can surface without fear of prosecution now. There are no prosecutors with a budget or appetite to take on the Kennedy murder, not in Texas, not anywhere. With any credentials at all behind his story, the modern day Thomas Jones can get an agent or manager or publisher or lawyer, or all of the above, to push a book deal, a TV interview, an infomercial with a DVD. He can appear safely on the web instead of in a booth where the vets can jump him. He can get it out on Amazon, drive traffic to his own
site, and sell, sell, sell. And with each copy sold, he can expose, a bit more, the ones who kept the nest for Oswald and Ruby.

Mary’s son John ran away to Europe, to leave his mother facing the gallows alone. When they brought John back a few years later to stand trial in a civil court, a hung jury was unable to decide what he knew and when he knew it. They let him go, and so John lived. There was something about Mary. She kept the nest that hatched the egg, and for it, she became the first woman in American history to be executed.

The Boesch Law Group handles business, entertainment and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of three editions of the California Judges’ Association’s Media Guide on Cameras in the Courtroom

His friends called him Kirk but I always called him Professor Kirkpatrick. He sat whitehaired dignified in his wheelchair, patient to his admiring students, popular, even kind. So I felt grateful to take 3 of his classes, plus a seminar, plus an independent study. He became my advisor. He recommended me, and we had our private moments when he changed his gray suit for a cardigan. I had access to him, maybe not as much as some, but all I needed. I was sure he taught by the truth.

If only then I knew the questions to ask. Lyman Kirkpatrick, before coming to Brown University in the mid-1960’s as Professor of Political Science, had no academic career to speak of. Since the early 50’s, his legs paralyzed from polio, the man worked as the Inspector General of the CIA, a direct report to Director Allen Dulles. Being around as long as Kirk had been, the IG knew secrets from all around the Agency. His was the job of a ghost, inspecting and auditing covert operations that weren’t supposed to exist, long before and after the murder of President Kennedy.

The world learned a lot more about Professor Kirkpatrick in 1998, long after Kirk died, when the CIA finally released his secret critique of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The Inspector General’s Survey of the Cuban Operation not only blamed CIA planners for misleading the President, but before the CIA sealed his report for a lifetime, they attached to it the “Rebuttal” by Richard Bissell from ‘Plans.’ Bissell repeated the Agency’s angry view that everything was Kennedy’s fault, because 1500 CIA-trained Cubans were cut down and captured by Castro’s army when Kennedy pulled the plug on air support. He let good men die, Bissell said, so he could pretend he was never involved, when everyone already knew the US was behind the attack. It had to be in the Rebuttal, because Kirk wouldn’t do the CIA whitewash. He and his 3 investigators asked enough upsetting questions, that they didn’t know what to do with Kirk anymore. He wrote himself right out of a job with his IG reports, and then he left to teach, and then the CIA buried the reports he left behind…at least for the next 33 years.

To date, only two court cases have come out of the assassination. New Orleans Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw became Oliver Stone’s film “JFK,” and Mark Lane defended the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Howard Hunt, a story retold in the best-seller Plausible Denial. In both cases, jurors said they believed Oswald did not act alone, that a number of people conspired to murder the President. The House Select Committee on Assassinations later reported the same thing.

We just didn’t know back then. We didn’t know that the same agents in the Cuban operation, who managed Lee Harvey Oswald, also shared assassination training and intense hatred for JFK. We didn’t have Joan Mellon’s Farewell to Justice, the 2005 account of how the CIA torpedoed Garrison’s case. We didn’t have David Talbot’s Brothers, the 2007 story of Bobby Kennedy’s private thoughts on the murder. Most of us didn’t have the foresight of a Mark Lane to see through the Warren Commission to the outrage of cover-up. For years, we didn’t even have the buried Zapruder film, which shows in slow motion before our very own eyes how the President was shot first from behind and then an instantlater from the grassy knoll in the front.

We questioned authority in the late ‘60’s, but the skills and tools of cross-examination were yet to come. So what to do now? The answer is that it’s time to pursue freedom of information to the ends of this earth. Follow Freedom of Information Act suits against bureaucrats who still withhold evidence. Support nonprofits and independent researchers. You can and should write your Congressman, but our government agencies won’t do anything. Read again how Mark Lane proved the truth of the story that placed the CIA’s Cuban operation, and Hunt, in the middle of the conspiracy to murder the President. Cross-reference the good works by Mellon and Talbot and others, and keep unpeeling the onion. Line up the lawyers who represented the characters in this bad play. This is the lesson of Blood, Money & Power, the book by a partner in Ed Clark’s Texas lawfirm. For years Clark served as LBJ’s personal lawyer and fixer, from the corrupt build-up of wealth, through to the end of his Presidency. It’s not news that Clark’s law partner puts Clark in the middle of the assassination web, but that he does it with information kept confidential for years by attorney-client privilege. According to Talbot, known CIA assassin David Morales told his lawyer he was in Dallas on November 22. Go after every lawyer file and note and recollection, and never take no or ‘privilege’ for an answer.

When the President was murdered, Kirk still ran the Office of the Inspector General of the CIA. He and his investigators knew more than anyone about the connections of the CIA’s Cubans. They wrote the inside book on it; they were competent, and dedicated. If I could have back just one seminar night with the professor, I’d be ready with the questions this time. What can still be done to chart the days for all the suspect CIA assets and agents? Where were they and what were they doing that week when Kennedy was shot? What about the killings of all these witnesses? Oswald contacts Guy Banister and David Ferrie, murdered before testifying, Johnny Roselli, implicated and murdered before testifying, witness after witness, victim after victim, knowing a little or a lot and dying for it…And how is it possible that police can question Oswald for 2 days before he’s killed, with no record of what he said?

Then, on a night in his office, one on one, when he’d be wearing his cardigan, I’d ask Kirk for the Inspector General’s survey of the assassination. I’d ask him for the truth. I still want to believe that he would have told me, and that we would have lived to tell the world. If only then I knew the questions to ask.

The Boesch Law Group handles business and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of 3 editions of the California Judges’ Association’s handbook on cameras in the courtroom.

The LA Times reminded us this week that the fate of Roe v. Wade likely depends on this Presidential Election. The next President, they say, will appoint the swing votes on the Supreme Court for or against the right to abortion. Democrats and “liberal” groups frame the debate in favor of a woman’s right to choose…pro-choice. “Conservatives” and the Republican platform promote the right to life…pro-life. Justice Scalia himself has taken to the airwaves to remind voters that the Founding Fathers did not write into the Constitution a right to abortion.

But the news soundbites and the one-liner debates miss the real point of what is at stake here. Who after all doesn’t like life? Or for that matter the idea of choice? By casting the issue in such limited terms, the debaters on both sides neglect what Roe v Wade really was all about. What Just Scalia doesn’t emphasize, what the simple debate ignores, is that Roe V Wade affirms a Constitutional right to privacy. Admitting that “the Constitution does not explicitly mention any right to privacy, the Supreme Court nonetheless found by a plurality, barely, that “personal, marital, familial and sexual privacy [are] said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbras”. They wrote “said to be protected,” because they knew of course that the right to privacy does not appear anywhere in the Bill of Rights. Finding something in a penumbra is like touching a spirit. What mortal men get to do that? And who knows what a “penumbra” is anyway?

When anti-abortion advocates demand strict construction of the Constitution and rant against judges who create law, the trouble is that this now fundamental right to privacy was created precisely in the manner they oppose. Our privacy rights came into the Constitutional world in judicial opinions striking down laws against contraception and interracial marriage, by judges who stretched to rule against police invasion of the bedroom. Fragile and vulnerable from its beginning, the right to privacy grew stronger with fits and starts and building precedents until its coming out, its bar mizyah, in Roe v Wade. Judges who found this right in the “penumbras” were finding and making a rule of law that Congress and the Founding Fathers did not make.

What a good thing they did. Who now doesn’t believe in privacy? Conservatives want their freedom from government intrusion same as liberals and libertarians. Motherhood, apple pie and privacy are nonpartisan All-American. Cutting back on privacy – or taking away its legitimacy as a Constitutional right because it was “created” by judges and not by our Founding Fathers – is truly a slippery slope. Does anybody really want less privacy protection.

Children are taught early about the importance of their privacy and respecting the personal space of others. We accept as a given now, through decades of change seeping into our consciousness and our Constitutional interpretations, that privacy is an honored Constitutional right…maybe our most important right, up there high on the list with free speech and freedom of religion.

Until Roe v Wade is overturned.

The Boesch Law Group handles business and personal litigation matters throughout Southern California. Among its high profile litigation, Mr. Boesch was lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in obtaining her federal court judgments, including the #1 Judgment in the Nation according to US Law Week. He successfully represented the Wall Street Journal against all major oil companies in the leading federal case on public access to court files; and is the author of 3 editions of the California Judges’ Association’s handbook on cameras in the courtroom.

“David Steals Goliath’s Music.” A New York Times editorial weighs online music piracy.

“David Versus Goliath.” – Business Week describes podcast wars.

Under the heading “David and Goliath,” it’s Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Rosie on rightwingnews.com.

Newsweek says Arabs on the street see America as Goliath.

An ad agency just calls itself “David and Goliath,” because everyone must know what that means.

It’s the classic confrontation. David, small and quick, lines up against the hugely ugly and powerful Goliath. Goliath goes down with one stone from David’s sling, defeated, beheaded, and abused for eternity. David becomes the rich king of all he sees. No one since has doubted that the Philistine deserved to die.

Taking a closer look, the man had 3 brothers, a mother, father, and a hundred dependents. A breadwinner with a long work history and a bright future, the man would be sorely missed, the loss of his care and protection worth boatloads of gold. The calculation of damages, all those zeros, could excite the dull deposition of any expert economist. Proving the death a wrongful one would be less heresy, more common sense. If the lawyer did his job to get a fair jury beyond all the hype of public attention, the facts could roll out easily. The theme, and all trials have themes, is that this death could have been avoided. Sure, this obnoxious man had stood in the valley for forty days, screaming challenges, but when jurors thought about it, taunts don’t justify murder. David’s lawyers could not justify the deadly strike. The young man’s move had been calculated, premeditated. It didn’t matter how much bigger Goliath was. It didn’t matter how afraid others might be. David had acted without fear, without doubt or remorse. It didn’t matter that Goliath killed when he felt like it. Even the most grotesque among us has the right to live. The trial would not need especially clever crossexamination. Before two thousand witnesses, David had marched ahead toward Goliath with a single, openly stated purpose. He said he’d kill him. He intended to kill him. He felt no fear. He even took off his armor. He was that confident, even arrogant, in his righteousness.

The death scene wouldn’t help David’s defense. The 9-foot Goliath, as tall as he was, stood in a valley beneath two hilltops. When the experts measured the angles, everyone could tell that David struck from above, from a distance Goliath had no chance to reach. As powerful as the man was, he could not have hurled his heavy sword the entire distance if he’d wanted to, and no one saw him try.

Faster, more agile, more clever, David’s advantages began to add up. Trained for years in the arts of his sling, teachers said David could nail a bullseye from a hundred paces, and Goliath stood much closer than that. Whatever Goliath could see coming toward his one good eye wouldn’t matter anyway. Everyone knew Goliath was too slow to move out of the way of anything, too slowwitted to think to duck. When they tried to defend David with a self-defense theme, good counsel would have been ready. There was that trick move David pulled before he let go with his sling. Samuel wrote it in the Bible, and so it must be. David yelled that he was going to feed Goliath’s carcass to the birds. When David pointed overhead, and Goliath looked up toward birds that weren’t even there, when the big man didn’t see it coming, David unleashed his strike.

Wrongful death. Murder. In the first degree. David’s defense would be left to flay away with cute lies… ‘if the stone don’t fit you gotta acquit’ and that sort of thing. The dead man’s family had proven liability, and  significantly, a defendant with the means to pay. David would be King with a store of gold. Damages, punitive damages, the sky was the limit. Of course, King Saul had on retainer lawyers who were too smart for all that. The day after, and for all time, David was an international celebrity, famous beyond all realms. With such a reputation to protect, a legacy greater than the fits and grief of the few, Saul’s lawyers had the situation surrounded with overwhelming efficiency, and privacy. Philistines might complain that the celebrity got unfair favorable treatment, what with no prosecution, being made king and all. But Philistines never could know what was happening behind the scenes. That was the whole point of it. The competence of the lawyers guaranteed the privacy of the outcome. Real names were hidden by trusts, the agreements were tight, the consequences of breach severe. If anything hit the press, they were ready with pre-packaged releases on self-defense and good riddance.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone if money were paid privately to protect a world class celebrity. It wouldn’t cost too much, because after Goliath died, David’s men routed his army, looted his villages and left the victims very needy. They couldn’t wait for a long trial to feed their kids. Food and shelter before lawsuits, David’s lawyers said. And they were right. They also knew there would be a payment. There could be no trial, no tarnish, nothing to hold back the creation and wonder of the celebrity that was David. That’s celebrity justice. Today it’s the hamburger stand against the Big Mac, the indie film hunting distribution in a crowded market, a sexually harassed employee with no witnesses, the boutique against the chain. Anytime it’s small against big, the few against the many, it’s David and Goliath all over again, and both of them need help.

Philip Boesch and the Boesch Law Group were the lead trial counsel in obtaining the record judgments for Anna Nicole Smith, and in obtaining a California state record wrongful death judgment. They have represented numerous celebrities in high-profile lawsuits, and in settling disputes on a low profile basis.

Philip W. Boesch is the principal and founder of the Boesch Law Group and an experienced litigator. He has obtained a state record wrongful death verdict in one case, and in another case what U.S. Lawyer’s Weekly profiled as the Number One Judgment in the United States. The Boesch Law Group practices business litigation and personal litigation in all state and federal courts.

Litigation is a nasty business, an expensive process by which ordinarily civilized people resolve conflict, so as to come to a settlement no one is happy with. The first rule you learn about settlement is that a good one is equally disliked by all sides.

No one comes to litigation with much affection for the one who sues him, and it is easy to understand revenge when your loved ones are injured or your business is attacked. In a legal system where people pay for their mistakes through court process, parties hire headhunters to battle for private notions of justice distorted by pain.

Headhunting begins with the selection of the litigator. “Nice and thoughtful” works for estate planners. Litigators should flash menace, inspire fear. James Woods in “Shark” is the hungry, vicious animal you’d love to set loose on your enemies. On “Boston Legal,” the relentless brilliance of James Spader has, as its foundation, a do-anything/ say-anything strength that has no consequence but success. Yes, it is important to be smart, but not enough. The meanest bully, the one who eats nails for breakfast and your enemies for lunch (a headhunter) is the litigator most people think they want.

Anthropologists who study headhunting know that the practice was not confined to the jungles of New Guinea or the Amazon. David took Goliath’s head, and the Celts practiced headhunting too, because it reflected dominance and power and control. Wearing a man’s head on your belt completed the victory. Fill it with hot pebbles and sand, drop it in a simmering pot of water, wait twenty hours and then you had him. Shrinking it took his soul.

Divorce is fertile territory for headhunting. Punishing the guilty, sharing agony, slicing and dicing and shrinking heads,
can be stated goals or merely wishes left unsaid. Depositions can be ritualistic practices not so much to gather evidence
but to give the witness a painful dose of what misery awaits in the glare of the courtroom. Litigators refer knowingly
to “scorched earth” tactics designed to inflict discomfort and waste. The phenomenon of spending a dollar to ask a question that will cost ten dollars to answer is called “interrogatories.” Serving subpoenas on secretaries, lovers, bosses and confidants follows the terrorist tactic of instilling fear by lining up the loved ones of the enemy.

There are 54,000 lawyers in Los Angeles County; many of them litigators who have to promote themselves as the toughest headhunters money can buy. But as the headhunter ages and survives, the lessons sink in. It’s not the fear that
there always will be a younger, faster gun around the corner. It’s not a waning of desire either, because strong survivors in any field take satisfaction in being the best at what they do. The real lessons of war are in knowing how and when to reach for those small openings towards peace, in knowing how to build the bridge, piece by piece, to those you are working so hard to destroy. Bridge-building is the real art, lost in the beginning of a lawsuit, but reappearing always as exhaustion sets in. And exhaustion does inevitably follow because litigants cause each other so much unnecessary expense before the final round of a trial.

Henry Kissinger wrote that “we do not have the privilege of pretending a limitless capacity to impose our will.” As the
wise headhunter knows, as the Iraq war debate tells us, the preparation for the peace should precede the preparation for the war. Everyone knows that bridges are not built in a day. It takes skill, design, negotiation and, most of all, it takes communication and trust.

Headhunting leaves the warrior’s head, soul and spirit on his opponent’s belt— emotionally unavailable. With no one building bridges, endless expense remains as the reminder that there are headhunters out there who still practice their art without the slightest regard for client interest. You should carefully hire the headhunter at your peril, or you may reap what you sow.

Philip W. Boesch is the principal and founder of the Boesch Law Group and an experienced litigator. He has obtained a
state record wrongful death verdict in one case, and in another case what U.S. Lawyer’s Weekly profiled as the Number One
Judgment in the United States. The Boesch Law Group practices business litigation and personal litigation in all state and
federal courts.

Petra Hernandez, the bread-winning mother of four, was on her way to work along Route 144. Ten minutes later, state troopers sifted the remains of Petra’s head-on meet with a dozing truck driver. One minute Nga Li was minding her own business, turning left on Alvarado, heading home. Next thing she remembered there were bandages on her face and the loud moans of a charity ward, courtesy of the speeding cabdriver who hit her. At the hospital, Eliza Hurtault, who checked in two days earlier with a bleeding ulcer, stared blankly at the $23,984 bill. Its payment would take all she had and then some.

The first underdogs were eastern shipbuilders who laid their logs over a pit on planks called dogs. On top, the overdog pulled the two-man saw. In the hole, the underdog held on, sucking in the sawdust. In the west, prairie dogs were the underdogs, critters who hid in their holes, or who came out to be eaten, shot or stomped.

Underdogs have less everything: less money, less power, fewer advantages. As the insurance company saw it, Petra the cafeteria worker wasn’t wearing her seatbelt, and she was married to an unemployed husband who couldn’t read or write, and so, minimum wage, minimum offer. As for Nga Li, she might have contributed to the accident. No offer. Eliza Hurtault? She sold everything she could and worked harder than ever to keep up payments, even though she’d been charged four times what an HMO patient would have been charged for the same treatment.

Unfair? Life isn’t fair. Every contest has an underdog. Insurance claim reps have to measure death in some way. Contributory negligence always meant no recovery. And our elected officials passed the laws that encourage HMO’s to negotiate lower prices for health care.

It’s always been this way. The deck has been stacked against the underdog since the day California became a state. Back then, Chief Justice David Terry assured followers that the Chinese and the Irish never would be allowed in his courts. Slavery would stay legal in California, Terry promised, even if the state had to be divided in half. When Senator David Broderick stood for abolition, our Chief Justice shot him dead in a rigged duel.

“It takes great courage to step forward with less, to confront fear and threat in litigation that’s already hard enough to understand. To find justice in the system, we depend on this courage and you can count on the day the underdog strikes back.”

Judges are still people, with experiences and prejudices and points of view. They go to judging school, and some get high marks, while others deserve D’s and F’s. The duels are now verbal and the barriers, though not so obvious, remain impossibly high for the underdogs. It costs money, too much money for most, to hire good lawyers to navigate a system of complaints, pleadings, discovery, depositions, hearings, mediations, all before you get to trial. Little wonder underdogs remain underground, coming up only when they must.

So when does “unfair” become so intolerable that you just have to come out? Do you wait until an unfair competitor puts you out of business? Or until collection agents come to take your house? Or until you are paralyzed? Or dead?

When Nga Li decided to stand up against an unfair system, her court opinion in Li v. Yellow Cab changed the law of the land. Contributory negligence no longer barred all recovery of damages. Liability would forever thereafter be apportioned and divided among those responsible, changing the lives of thousands, millions of injured victims. When Guadalupe Hernandez turned down the token settlement offer for the death of his beloved wife, the state record jury verdict changed the way the insurance companies evaluated a child’s loss of a parent.

When Eliza Hurtault had to respond to agents collecting a bill for services four times the amount charged to an HMO patient, she and eleven others like her stood up as test cases against an unfair business practice. Her courage resulted in the “Compact with the Uninsureds,” reducing charges and eliminating the unfairness for many of the most needy patients. Underdogs again changed the way business was done.

No one ever prosecuted Justice Terry for murdering a U.S. Senator. The Chief Justice followed his prejudice to become a Brigadier General in the Confederate Army and returned after the war to a life of politics and prosperity until 1888. Supporting his young second wife, who lost a case on appeal, Terry approached and bullied the appellate justice who decided his wife’s case. The man’s bodyguard intervened and shot Terry dead. On the theory of “good riddance,” no one was prosecuted for that murder either.

It takes great courage to step forward with less, to confront fear and threat in litigation that’s already hard enough to understand. To find justice in the system, we depend on this courage and you can count on the day the underdog strikes back.

Mr. Boesch was appointed by the Los Angeles Superior Court as guardian ad litem of the 4 Hernandez children, lead trial counsel, and then after collection of the Judgment, Court-appointed guardian of the children’s estates. The Boesch Law Group successfully represented Eliza Hurtault and 11 other test cases, achieving peace for them and the hospitals’ Compact with the Uninsureds.

A mind-numbingly tragic end – Start with the young beauty, out there in every sense, with the rich older man. Add the scandalous theft of oil billions by bribery and forgery. Mix in sensational front-page death with uninformed legal opinions. Finish with a baby girl whose paternity is challenged in headlines, and you get media frenzy for the ages.

But the baby in this story is Elizabeth Ann, not Anna Nicole’s Dannielynn. It’s 1923. The elderly lover is Warren Harding, the childless 29th President of the United States, who watches his cronies steal the national oil reserves, gets his young beauty pregnant, and escapes impeachment by dying of “food poisoning.” The scorned First Lady and her doctor, suspects in the poisoning, are also dead within the year. The President’s Daughter becomes a best-seller… which leaves Elizabeth Ann for the media. Chased and hounded by the hordes, Elizabeth Ann stands up as tall as she can.

Fast forward 84 years. The media now swarming Anna Nicole serves a billion people. Publications carry scoops at warp speed. Dannielynn is surrounded and unarmed for an unfair fight.

Freedom of information is expected, memorialized in statutes, etched in stone. Reporters, stringers and paparazzi grab soundbites and pictures from here to Namibia. For decades, the Public’s Right to Know has enjoyed its support in First Amendment case law. The Public’s Right changed the rules of court, and now cameras are routine in state courts. In another leading case, the Public’s Right to Know steamrolled Big Oil to discover price-fixing evidence. In still another, Sarah Jane Moore aimed to kill President Ford. When a marine tackled the assassin, the Public had a Right to Know, and so media reports outed the gay hero. The man’s complaint against the L.A. Times was dismissed, because no one is safe from his celebrity. Even the hero’s privacy stands no chance against the Public’s Right to Know.

And in this corner, hopelessly wondering
why her mother is not there……Dannielynn,
the daughter of Anna Nicole. So how can
one little girl stand against a Public a
billion strong and clamoring for tidbits every day?

My money is on Dannielynn.

Fifty years after Elizabeth Ann, the Supreme Court held in Roe v. Wade that our right to privacy is a fundamental constitutional right. We expect our privacy, with a passion no less than we reserve for our right to know. Backlash grows against media excess in recycling every intrusive detail. Even many who tune in must feel for the girl’s right to grow up in peace.

A billion to one is nothing new here. When Anna’s husband died, cut off from funds and left with bills, Anna filed for bankruptcy. It was Pierce Marshall who sued Anna in the Bankruptcy Court in 1996, he who made a Federal case out of it. Answering Pierce’s nasty lawsuit against her, Anna won not one but two Federal Court Judgments. Her claims were never tried in any other court. In the Judgment recently reinstated by a unanimous United States Supreme Court, Judge Carter wrote that the conduct of Pierce’s agents against Anna was so outrageous –perjury and forgery and destroying evidence –that he doubled the award of punitive damages to $45 million. Through the years of litigation abuse, Anna coped in a very human way with pressures from enemies with a billion dollars when she had none. That she survived such relentless pressure for so long belies a strength that few see in the video clips.

When justice is done, and a substantial Federal Judgment is collected, it will cost large sums to buy privacy against a billion eyes, even for some of the time. Ask Brad and Angelina.

So what of Elizabeth Ann? The Elizabeth Ann Guild lobbied awhile to eliminate the notion of “illegitimate” children, and then she disappeared. She married, moved to Glendale and raised 2 sons in obscurity. Decades later, when Harding’s love letters surfaced, historians tracked her down to push DNA testing, to confirm for all time that she was indeed the President’s daughter. “No thanks,” she said. “We’ve been doing just fine.” In 2005, Elizabeth Ann died peacefully at age 86. Peace is possible, Dannielynn will learn. Its path will be hers to choose.

Philip Boesch successfully represented the Wall Street Journal in Dow Jones v. Mobil Oil, the Los Angeles Times in Sipple v. Los Angeles Times, 26 of 27 TV news anchors to get camera coverage in the Hillside Strangler case, the first of many, and he has authored three editions of the Judges’ Media Handbook on cameras in the courtroom. Since 1996, Mr. Boesch has been lead trial counsel for Anna Nicole Smith in both Federal Court cases, obtaining the Judgments for $475 million and $90 million. The Boesch Law Group remains as lead counsel in protecting and collecting these Judgments.