By
Anastasia Ching
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Gregory Craig discusses 'lawyering' in high-profile cases
Trial law can be compared to sports - that is, according to Gregory Craig, counsel to Elian Gonzalez's father, President Bill Clinton and would-be Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinkley Jr.
"Trial law is a lot like being a professional athlete," Craig said. "There's a score at the end. The public is watching you - you win some, and you lose some.
"Losing is part of being a trial lawyer," he added. "It's not about winning, it's about doing the best for your client."
Craig, a partner in the Washington, D.C., law firm Williams and Connolly, spoke to an audience of 60 students and law professors at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law Friday.
Craig's lecture, titled "Lawyering in High Profile Cases: The Elian Gonzalez Saga, the Clinton Impeachment and the Defense of Reagan's Assailant," focused on the role of the media and the public in his highest-profile cases.
Craig pointed out a few media-driven trends he has observed in trial law since he began practicing law in the early 1970s.
The media environment has changed dramatically - particularly the advent of cable TV, which gives anyone an opportunity to become an expert in law just by tuning-in to CourtTV.
Clients want their lawyers to defend them in public - this results in more high-profile cases and more celebrity lawyers, such as Johnnie Cochran, O.J. Simpson's lawyer.
There is absolutely no correlation between celebrity lawyer status and proficiency and competency as a trial lawyer - the greatest trial lawyers are often the most obscure.
Heather Gardner, a pre-business freshman who attended the lecture because she is interested in attending law school, said she was surprised that public opinion and the media play such a large part in trial law.
"I had no idea of the amount of strategy that is involved in lawyering," Gardner said. "It's interesting how much lawyers orchestrate things in terms of public opinion so as to influence the jury without them even knowing that they're being influenced."
Craig said that the defense team of John Hinkley, Jr., the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, did not inform the press enough about Hinkley's insanity - a move that he said could have possibly changed the outcome of the case in Hinkley's favor.
"We had made a big mistake not informing the media more," he said. "We had CAT scan evidence showing the abnormalities of Hinkley's brain, we had psychiatric testimony attesting to his insanity, we just did not have these issues reported adequately in the press, and the result was that the jurors went the way they did."
The mistakes in the Hinkley trial helped to make better lawyering judgments in the Clinton trial, Craig said.
"Defending President Clinton in his impeachment trial involved a lot of public lawyering," he said. "We had to keep public opinion on our side, and we did."
Craig said that the public lawyering required in representing Elian Gonzalez's father, though, was of a much more fragile, emotional nature.
"We had to convince the American people that it was not an issue of politics," he said. "This was an issue of fathers and sons and families."
Craig said he does not let his clients' character or reputation affect their representation or right to a fair trial.
"I don't agree that as a pre-requisite to representing someone that they should be president of the United States or archbishop," he said. "I don't pass judgments on my clients."
