Word: giesler
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tactic in rape cases was to make the victims seem even more rapacious than the accused. When Alexander Pantages was prosecuted for violating a 17-year-old girl, Giesler first established that the girl was strong and athletic and could probably have pinned the scrawny old theater owner to the floor if she had wished to. She had arrived in court in pigtails and a little girl's dress, so Giesler asked the judge to make her wear the clothes she had worn the day of the "rape." After she showed up in a low-cut crimson gown, Pantages...
...bald, unprepossessing man who looked like a half brother to both Adlai Stevenson and Alfred Hitchcock, Giesler delivered his exhortations to juries in a crescendoing whine, sometimes trailing off into the deep purple. He defended Walter Wanger after the jealous producer fired a -38-cal. slug into the groin of a fellow whom he considered too attentive to his wife, Joan Bennett. Giesler decided this was temporary insanity. "For a brief mo ment," he told the jury, "through the violet haze of early evening, Wanger saw things in a bluish flash." The jury some how saw it that...
...Giesler's client Robert Mitchum, ar rested for smoking marijuana, also went to jail. Although Giesler was fairly sure that Mitchum had been framed, he counseled against a not-guilty plea in order to avoid the added publicity of a drawn-out jury trial. "My handling of the Mitchum and Wanger cases saved the motion-picture industry much grief," Giesler said much later in his as-told-to book with Saturday Evening Post Writer Pete Martin, "but they didn't appreciate it then. They don't appreciate it now. It has always been the industry...
...Specialty. Son of a bank cashier, Harold Lee Giesler (pronounced Geese-ler) was born in Wilton Junction, Iowa. He was about to go to the University of Michigan when he developed eye trouble and went instead to Los Angeles, where he drove a horse-drawn lumber wagon. Soon he began studying law at U.S.C. and clerking in the office of Earl Rogers, a flamboyant attorney who was a kind of Edwardian Giesler. Rogers nicknamed him Jerry, and the young attorney got some of his first courtroom experience helping Rogers successfully defend Clarence Darrow against a charge of bribing jurors...
...Giesler was soon cutting his eyeteeth in some toweringly strange trials. Murders were a specialty, and in all, Giesler handled more than 70 murder cases over the years. Not one of his clients was executed, not even Bugsy Siegel, the excess-personnel man at Murder, Inc. And when Norman Selby, the fighter known as Kid McCoy, * was charged with the murder of his mistress, Giesler got a verdict of manslaughter even though Selby had earlier insisted to the police that he was guilty. Giesler's explanation of the confession: the Kid was so depressed that he wanted...