An Examination of how LBJ’s Friend Percy Foreman Guaranteed James Earl Ray’s Lifetime Sentence – While Earning a Lifetime “Keep Out of Jail” Card for Himself .
Dick Cavett: “A lot of people in the legal profession were astounded at how you got [James Earl Ray] to change the plea [from “not guilty” to “guilty”].”
Percy Foreman: “I didn’t get him to change the plea. [Laughing] I simply told him that I thought he would be executed if he didn’t.”
—The Dick Cavett Show, June 9, 1969
Percy’s Rise from Country Bumkin to Rich, Flamboyant Attorney
Percy Foreman was born in a log cabin in Polk County Texas in 1902 and dropped out of high school as a teenager; he later took correspondence courses before studying law at the University of Texas, where he graduated in 1927. He credited his mother for urging him to pursue his career as a lawyer, saying: “Were it not for her, I would have become a professional wrestler.” The following excerpts from an article in The New York Times published on the day after James Earl Ray named Foreman to replace his previous attorney provides a glimmer into how he carved out his later position in the top tier of Texas criminal attorneys: [1]
Foreman marshals an oratorical expertise nurtured as a lecturer on the Chautauqua circuit, where he shared platforms in small towns with Cossack dancers and Swiss bellringers. “If you didn’t talk for two and a half hours, people thought they were cheated.” He often calls on his command of the Scriptures honed by the fact that he is a Baptist deacon. And in haranguing juries he is prone to draw on his reading — “anything from the Bible to Playboy,” an employee has said.
Lest the reader presume that his bible reading connotes a character guided by a high moral ethos and strict observance of legal precepts such as the niceties of due process, it should be understood that, in Percy’s case, such was not the case, as will be demonstrated below.
The “Official” Legend of Percy Foreman
At the top of the pyramid of the most famed Texas criminal lawyers stands the “legendary” Percy Foreman, who compiled a spectacular record of acquittals in seemingly unwinnable cases. Supporting that legend is the (intrinsically and implicitly, “authorized”) 1969 Foreman biography by Michael Dorman, King of the Courtroom: Percy Foreman for the Defense.
Even at the publication date of that book, nearly twenty years before Foreman’s death when he was still actively involved in legal work, the author stated that his subject had represented “more accused killers than any man in history—upwards of 1,000.” Yet, of that number, only 55 had gone to prison for their deeds and only one had been executed. According to author Dorman, the credo fastidiously followed by Foreman was: [2]
[A defense attorney] should never allow the defendant to be tried. Try someone else—the husband, the lover, the police or, if the case has social implications, society generally. But never the defendant.
To illustrate Foreman’s technique, in one of his most famous cases before taking James Earl Ray’s, he defended a lady named Candy Mossler and her young paramour Melvin Powers – who was also her nephew – for the murder of Candy’s multi-millionaire husband, Jacques Mossler. Percy began that trial by stating to the jury that, “If each one of the 39 knife wounds had been inflicted by a different person, there still would be three times that number of people left with real or imaginary justification to want the death of Jacques Mossler.” He then noted some of Mossler’s alleged character traits that might have given unnamed other persons reason to want him dead: “Mossler was a ruthless businessman, a sexual deviate and a Jekyll and Hyde,” without producing one scrap of evidence to support any of those accusations. [3] By painting the victim as a closeted homosexual, Foreman declared it was inevitable that his poor wife was forced to seek male companionship elsewhere. And that created, in the minds of the jurors, a strawman suspect – an unidentified homosexual lover apparently jilted by Jacques – who had supposedly become so upset that he furiously stabbed Mossler 39 times.
Further distancing his clients from the aura of guilt, he managed to convince the jury that, if anything, the elderly dead man had certainly deserved to die. Falsely portraying Jacques as an irredeemable bully who, among other things, used to snap a bullwhip at his young wife’s feet to make her dance – it was merely a story that apparently originated as a hallucination within Foreman’s mind.
But he wanted to make that bold point stick, and endure for the entire trial, so he acquired a number of bullwhips, and arranged them on the defense table in front of the jury. Throughout the trial, they remained displayed in front of the jurors as reminders of the allegedly vicious husband. Foreman often picked them up as he went to great lengths to refresh the point during the course of the trial, coiling and uncoiling them individually, then shuffling through them as visual reminders of the original point, occasionally snapping one of them against the table to add emphasis to an important point. By the time the defense team rested and the judge gave them their instructions, all twelve of the jurors had become convinced that the kindly old man, who had always been of a heterosexual bent, succumbed to the lovely young lady many years before, but had, apparently, morphed into a wretched, vicious, closeted homosexual philanderer with no redeemable character traits. Thus, the poor young wife and her proxy-lover –- though acknowledging her incestual relationship with her even younger nephew, while pointing out they were not on trial for that — were the real victims of the tragic event. Against a massive amount of evidence of their guilt, Foreman’s tactics prevailed when the jury found both Candy and Mel were not guilty of the murder of Jacques.[4]
A Fellow Texas Attorney’s Scathing Rebuttal of Foreman’s Conflicted “Legacy”
Contradicting Percy’s purported legend, as written in the biography referenced above — that of a scrupulously dedicated and “honorable” lawyer — was another Texas attorney, who had also attained stature near the top of that “famed Texas lawyers” pyramid. David Berg documented how Foreman’s actual record proved that he had attained his fame through avarice, guile and deceit; that he was a consummate liar, whose primary skills were related to the art of misdirection and subornation of perjury to achieve his stupendous record. In his 2013 memoir Run, Brother, Run, Berg wrote that Foreman used a standard two-pronged approach in nearly every case, the first of which matched what author Dorman referenced, above:
[T]he first, common among defense lawyers, was to put the victim on trial, argue that lots of people had a motive to kill him, and besides, the son of a bitch had it coming. The difference with Foreman was that he made most of it up—turned trials into a viciously inhumane assault on the dead man’s character. Foreman’s second step was not just backup: it was bulletproof. In case character assassination alone might fail, he reached into his stable of “reserve witnesses,” as he called them: former clients and others who repaid his favors by swearing to have been with his defendant at the time of the crime. It wasn’t just opposing prosecutors who knew that Foreman operated this way: his colleagues and even attentive laymen understood that he would do anything, no matter how dishonest, to win a trial.[5] (Italics added by author).
His use of the higher-risk “second step” option was reserved for cases in which the standard “try someone else” maneuver became impossible. But Percy did pull it out of his quiver In another infamous case, when he defended the hitman Charles Harrelson (father of famed actor Woody Harrelson) in a murder trial that took place immediately after destroying James Earl Ray’s chance of getting a fair trial in 1969. Despite son Woody’s apparent belief in his father’s innocence of multiple murders (though the only thing missing from his business care, below, is “Have Gun, Will Travel”), Oliver Stone reportedly instructed Woody to act out a scene in Natural Born Killers, “more like your father” would have done it.[6]
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