Gerry Spence, the buckskinned legal maverick who called himself America’s best trial lawyer and dramatized that claim with a white Stetson, a dazzling courtroom record and a score of books that gunned down his opponents all over again, died on Wednesday at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 96.
His son Kent Spence confirmed the death.
Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.
He sometimes poked fun at his own cowboy imagery — the snakeskin boots and 10-gallon hat, the long silvery-blond hair and buckskin-fringed jackets that conjured Buffalo Bill Cody.
But he exploited it all, often in seemingly hopeless criminal cases.
A man who shot his former wife in front of eight witnesses: Not guilty. The white supremacist charged with killing a federal agent at Ruby Ridge in Idaho: Not guilty. Imelda Marcos, the widow of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, accused of looting the Philippine treasury of $200 million for a lifestyle that included thousands of pairs of shoes and real estate in Manhattan: Not guilty.
In civil cases, he won huge judgments from corporate Goliaths. Penthouse magazine for libeling Miss Wyoming: $26.5 million. An Oklahoma nuclear-fuel producer for the radioactive contamination of Karen Silkwood: $10.5 million. The steel maker USX for cheating workers of their pension funds: $47 million. McDonald’s for breaching a contract with a tiny ice-cream company: $52 million.
Some awards were later cut or set aside, but the mystical idea of Spence invincibility lingered.
He was big, loud, swaggering and outrageous in court. He once clapped his hands in the face of a drowsy prosecutor and thundered, “Wake up!” He barked at judges.
In a corn-pone drawl, he once told a jury, “You’ve got to get the hogs out of the spring if you want to get the water cleared up.”
He always put on a good show, with tricks and stunts to go with the fine arts of cross-examination and jury persuasion. But behind the courtroom magic lay extensive investigations and meticulous research, techniques he detailed in books and in five-week seminars that he gave annually at the Trial Lawyers College he founded at his 220-acre ranch near Dubois, Wyo., southeast of Yellowstone National Park.
His literary output was prodigious — at least 20 books between 1982 and 2020. Many analyzed his cases. Others denounced justice in America, the legal establishment and lawyers who worked for wealthy clients. Critics faulted much of his writing, labeling it self-righteous hyperbole that was more like courtroom perorations than reasoned arguments. But others called him a gifted storyteller and praised his passion for defending ordinary people against entrenched powers.
Gerald Leonard Spence was born on Jan. 8, 1929, in Laramie, Wyo., the eldest of three children of Gerald and Esther (Pfleeger) Spence. His father was a chemist. His mother, who wanted Gerry to be a Methodist preacher, fatally shot herself when he was 19.
In 1948, he married Ann Wilson (later known as Anna), with whom he had four children. They were divorced in 1969, the year he married LaNelle Peterson Hawks. In addition to his son Kent, she survives him, as do another son, Kip; two daughters, Katy Spence and Kerry Spence Nickelson; two stepsons, Christopher and Brents Hawks; a brother, Tom; 13 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Mr. Spence graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1949 and from its law school in 1952. For eight years he was the Fremont County prosecutor. After running unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in 1962, he settled into a lucrative corporate practice in Riverton, Wyo., mostly defending insurance companies against accident-injury claims. His aggressive style generated an impressive record and a growing reputation in the Western states.
At 40, he had a midlife crisis. He struggled with alcoholism, lost some cases — three in a row, at one point — failed to get a judgeship, and by chance met a man who had been injured in a car accident and whose claim for damages Mr. Spence had cleverly undermined in court. He suddenly had doubts.
“Is it my job to cheat old men out of justice?” he recalled thinking in an autobiography, “The Making of a Country Lawyer” (1996). He abandoned corporations and insurers and vowed to represent underdogs.
Mr. Spence came to national attention in 1979 in the Karen Silkwood case. She had died in 1974 in a car crash on her way to talk to a reporter about flaws in safety practices in the production of plutonium at a Kerr-McGee plant in Oklahoma, where she had worked and become contaminated. Representing her family in their suit claiming negligence, Mr. Spence won $10.5 million in damages. (The case was later settled for $1.38 million — about $6.6 million today.) He re-examined the case in “Gunning for Justice” (1982).
That book also reviewed the case of Mark Hopkinson, a Wyoming man accused of killing four people, including a friend of Mr. Spence. Appointed a special prosecutor, Mr. Spence wore a bulletproof vest and brought bodyguards to court in the 1979 trial, and won a conviction and a death sentence. Mr. Spence, who opposed the death penalty, joined futile efforts to get the sentence cut to life. Mr. Hopkinson was executed in 1992.
Mr. Spence’s “Of Murder and Madness” (1983) focused on his defense of Joe Esquibel, a Mexican American man who shot his ex-wife at a welfare office in front of eight witnesses. Mr. Spence argued that poverty and discrimination had so twisted the killer’s psyche as to make him incapable of telling right from wrong when he fired the gun in a jealous rage. The jury agreed.
The 1990 New York racketeering trial of Mrs. Marcos made headlines for months. Prosecutors produced thousands of pages of bank records, telexes, receipts, memos, contracts and reports, calling them a trail of thievery. But Mr. Spence broke through with simplicity, calling his client “a lonely widow” and “a small, fragile woman” whose only crime was being “a world-class shopper.” She was found innocent.
In 1993, he defended the white supremacist Randy Weaver after a protracted gun battle with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, that left the defendant’s wife, his son and a federal agent dead.
While rejecting Mr. Weaver’s racist beliefs, Mr. Spence argued that his client had acted in self-defense and raised doubts about whose bullet had killed the agent. The jury acquitted Mr. Weaver of all major charges but convicted him of failing to appear at a 1991 weapons trial. He was sentenced to time served; Mr. Spence did not appeal.
Mr. Spence, who declined an offer to join O.J. Simpson’s defense team, became a household name in 1994 and 1995 as an NBC commentator on the Simpson case and a frequent guest on talk shows. He also analyzed the case in “O.J.: The Last Word” (1997). He concluded that Mr. Simpson was guilty of the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman, and he faulted the prosecution for not winning a conviction.
In 1995 and 1996, wearing his rawhides, he hosted “The Gerry Spence Show” weekly on CNBC. And he added to his shelf of books with “Give Me Liberty! Freeing Ourselves in the Twenty-First Century” (1998), “Half-Moon and Empty Stars” (2001, his first novel), and “Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail — Every Place, Every Time” (2005).
While he never formally retired, Mr. Spence later in life divided his time between homes in Wyoming and California. And he continued to write books, including “The Lost Frontier: Images and Narrative” (2013), a mainly pictorial memoir of his life in Wyoming; “Police State: How America’s Cops Get Away With Murder” (2015); “Court of Lies” (2019), a novel about a woman framed in a murder case by a politically ambitious prosecutor; and “The Martyrdom of Collins Catch the Bear,” (2020), about a Lakota Sioux man wrongfully charged with murder.
Mr. Spence’s unblemished case record was, of course, a fable. While no one kept track exactly, he was known to have lost a 1985 manslaughter trial in Oregon. And he lost a Wyoming traffic-court case, defending himself against a speeding ticket — and underscoring the adage that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Robert D. McFadden was a Times reporter for 63 years. In the last decade before his retirement in 2024 he wrote advance obituaries, which are prepared for notable people so they can be published quickly upon their deaths.
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