Word: bellies
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Walter E. Craig, president of the American Bar Association, rapped Belli hard in a speech to a gathering of lawyers in San Francisco, Belli's home town. The effect of Belli's "intemperate and abusive statements," said Craig, "was to question the integrity of the court and the jury. The canons of ethics provide that a lawyer having any justified grievance against a member of the judiciary should lodge that grievance with the appropriate authorities and not indulge in public defamation. Mr. Belli should know this. That he should so flagrantly disregard the code of professional ethics...
Texans, predictably, mounted a strenuous counterattack. Governor John Connally called Belli's tirade against Dallas "reprehensible." Attorney General Waggoner Carr told University of Texas law students that Belli's behavior "should shock all of our bar members from coast to coast...
Sparrow & Peacock. By the judgment of his colleagues, Belli not only erred in his post-trial blowup; he also bungled his courtroom tactics...
...gravest mistakes was to underestimate his antagonist, bear-shaped District Attorney Henry Menasco Wade. Belli referred to him as a yokel and a hog caller. But Wade's slow twangy drawl and furrowed face camouflage a tough, sharp mind. Under Wade, says a veteran Texas trial lawyer, Dallas County has "the toughest prosecution in the state of Texas." During the trial, Wade made a sparrow-and-peacock contrast with Belli; he played the earnest, rumpled country boy v. the gaudy city slicker, complete with red velvet briefcase. And Wade certainly knew that in the eyes of a Texas jury...
...unruffled and modest answers to newsmen's questions after the verdict, Wade said that Belli "put up as weak a case of psychiatric defense as I have ever seen." Asked what he would have done if he had been on the other side, Wade replied that he would not have risked all in an attempt to prove Ruby insane. "I would have tried to go for leniency," he said. Many lawyers agreed that Belli blundered in putting all the defense's eggs in the insanity basket. "If I had been in Belli's place," said District...