You ever lose a case?” Those were the words Gladys Towles Root heard as she stared at her first client through prison bars. Two days before, they had met in her law offices, which were freshly painted and furnished in purple. There, she and Louis Osuna, a Filipino immigrant, had discussed American divorce proceedings. But that was two days ago. Now her client’s wife was dead.
“You went about it the hard way. It’s murder now. Murder, you know, can cost you your life.”
“Not if you good lady lawyer. You ever lose a case?”
“No,” Gladys answered. She’d never tried one, after all.
“Good. I tell all prisoners in jail about you.”[1]
While some may object to her characterization, that, verbatim, was how Root recalled the meeting that launched her 53-year legal career – one remarkable in its empathy for the underprivileged.
At trial, Osuna was ordered to serve only ten months for the lesser charge of manslaughter. Within his first month in prison, fifteen of his fellow inmates put Root on retainer.
Root, a young woman who first appeared in the Los Angeles society pages at age ten, had graduated from USC law school in 1929, the year before she took on Osuna’s case. She had studied law at the encouragement of her father, but upon graduation Root discovered most law firms unfriendly to female attorneys. In fact, not long before Root started her studies the Los Angeles Bar Association had decided to deny women membership on the grounds that “even though they had diplomas and certificates, they could never be ‘full-fledged lawyers.’”
Following six months of searching for work with no luck, she opened her own practice. The success of her first case led Root to take on more and more people other lawyers had turned away – either because their cases were unsavory or because they came from the lower rungs of the social ladder. She began to make a living defending the defenseless. Soon, a phrase began echoing through the streets of Los Angeles. Upon an arrest, men and women were known to shout, “Get me Gladys!”
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In many states, including California, lawyers were banned from traditional advertising methods until 1977. So how did Root get her message out? She was known for her sensational courtroom attire. A fellow attorney remembered that in the trial of Frank Sinatra Jr.’s kidnappers, “she arrived one day wearing a low-cut fuchsia sheath, fuchsia shoes, a fuchsia hat and hair dyed to match. The whole scheme changed to a deep purple – a favorite color – the next day. She conceded later that the quick-change artistry on her hair was achieved with such aids as Easter egg dye and Mercurochrome,”[2] a bright green antiseptic. Enormous hats and jewelry were a constant. Apart from being great advertising, her costumes were also a trial tactic – they took the jury’s attention off the heinous crimes of which the defendants were often accused. It is more difficult to consider the realities of rape and murder when confronted with peacock feathers and egg-sized earrings.
And indeed, her tactic worked. Although many of Root’s clients were convicted, their sentences were largely reduced or suspended – a success in the eyes of many criminal defense attorneys. Root was something of a machine, handling 1,600 cases per year and averaging 75 court appearances per month. She pioneered new methods of collecting evidence, becoming one of the first prominent attorneys in Los Angeles to rely on private investigators for evidence. In one instance she consulted an astrologer. Her performative style also helped win cases. Once Root even had a grandfather clock wheeled into the courtroom, so the jury could hear the hypnotic tick and how it had persuaded her unstable client to hear the words, “Kill…Kill…Kill!”
Root’s annual gross income ran into the high six-figures by 1964. Her clients paid large fees if they could afford it. If they could not, her services were secured with deeds on their property, with livestock, and even, on one occasion, with hot goods from the very burglary over which the case was being heard.
Root’s proudest cases, in her own words, were those which helped her clients overcome miscegenation laws. She represented at least two white/Filipino couples who wanted to get married. The then-standing California law, written in 1905, the same year Root was born, read “All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mongolians, or mulattoes are illegal and void.” Root won both cases, but she did so by arguing about the specific bloodlines of each client, rather than challenging the law itself. In doing so she won the case for her clients but lost the opportunity for the ruling to hold lasting legal precedent.
Root, however, was less concerned with legal precedent than she was with the lives her clients would lead. She worked in criminal law until old age, and would not give it up, “one-hundred percent because I love people. They are screwy and heart-rending. I always try to help, but I can’t always do much.”[3] Try she did, making a half-century-long legal career by taking the side of those with nowhere left to turn. Further reflecting on her life, Root remembered the words of her father, all those years ago, encouraging her towards her vocation. “Gladys, you ought to be on stage – not the theater, but life’s real stage: the courtroom.”[4] In 1982 she made her exit from life’s stage on the courtroom floor. Defending two brothers in Pomona accused of sodomy and rape, she succumbed to a heart attack. She was wearing an entirely gold outfit.
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