Abe Krash, who as a junior partner at the law firm Arnold, Fortas & Porter played a critical role in Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously declared a right to counsel in criminal cases, died on July 6 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 97.
His daughter Jessica Krash confirmed the death.
The Gideon decision is widely considered one of the most significant of the 20th century, part of a string of cases in which the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren shored up Americans’ civil liberties in the face of the criminal justice system.
The case centered on a Florida man named Clarence Earl Gideon, who had been arrested in 1961 after breaking into a pool hall and stealing money from a vending machine. The judge denied his request for legal counsel, forcing him to mount his own defense. He was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison.
Mr. Krash’s involvement began in 1962, when Abe Fortas, one of his firm’s senior partners, called him into the office. Mr. Gideon had sent a handwritten plea to the Supreme Court, saying his constitutional rights had been violated and requesting that it take up his case.
The court agreed and asked Mr. Fortas to handle the case, perhaps because he and the firm’s founding partners, all veterans of the New Deal, were strong advocates for civil liberties. Mr. Fortas, in turn, assigned Mr. Krash to research every aspect of the case and help draft a brief.
As chronicled by Anthony Lewis of The New York Times in his book “Gideon’s Trumpet” (1964), Mr. Fortas dictated the overall strategy, but he left it to Mr. Krash to flesh it out.
Working with another junior lawyer, Paul Temple, and a summer associate, John Hart Ely, Mr. Krash spent months immersed in the history and finer details of the relevant case law and previous court decisions.
Mr. Krash provided vital support for Mr. Fortas’s two core arguments: that because many states and the federal government already provided universal counsel, establishing it as a right would not be a radical step; and that the current rule, under which defendants with “special circumstances” had to receive counsel, was too vague.
The court found in Mr. Gideon’s favor in 1963. He was later retried and acquitted.
Mr. Krash remained at the firm — which became Arnold & Porter after Mr. Fortas joined the Supreme Court in 1965 — for more than 30 years after the Gideon decision, working with a range of corporate and pro bono clients. As the firm grew, he became something of its moral compass, keeping the flame of its founding idealism alive.
Mr. Krash “was of a time when the legal profession was a noble profession,” Richard Alexander, the firm’s chairman, said in a phone interview. “He understood what we did to protect the rule of law was critical to a democratic society.”
At anniversary events and in newspaper interviews, Mr. Krash frequently spoke about the importance of Gideon, but he also spoke about what he considered its failed promise: Too many indigent defendants, he said, were still receiving inadequate legal representation, if any at all.
“It’s not enough to say you’re entitled to a lawyer,” he told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2003. “You need to have a competent lawyer, one that has to be provided adequate funds to retain experts and investigators to conduct an adequate defense.”
Abraham Krash was born on April 26, 1927, in Menominee, Mich., and grew up in Cheyenne, Wyo., where his father, Hyman, a Lithuanian immigrant, served as rabbi of the only synagogue in the state. His mother, Florence (Kaplan) Krash, was a Jewish immigrant from Poland.
Abe’s early aspirations were journalistic; he worked for his high school newspaper and as a freelance writer for The Eagle, a daily newspaper in Cheyenne. When World War II pulled many of its staff members into the military, Abe was hired as sports editor, at just 14 years old.
At 16 he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he became editor in chief of The Maroon, the student newspaper.
There, in early 1945, he oversaw a profile of Arthur Holly Compton, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and director of the school’s metallurgical laboratory, where, the paper noted, he was conducting research on splitting atoms.
The morning the article appeared, two men in trench coats came to the newspaper office. They told him the Army had confiscated every copy of the paper, as well as the plates used to print it, but refused to say why.
Only after the United States dropped two atomic bombs over Japan did he realize how close he had come to revealing the university’s top-secret role in the Manhattan Project.
Mr. Krash completed Chicago’s two-year Great Books course in 1946 and went directly into the university’s law school, receiving his J.D. in 1949. He then spent a year as a fellow at Yale Law School before moving to Washington.
He worked for a boutique firm before joining Arnold, Fortas & Porter, initially on a temporary basis. He became a partner in 1960 and fully retired in 1998. He also taught constitutional law at Georgetown, for over 20 years, and at Yale.
He married Joan Lee in 1957. Along with their daughter Jessica, she survives him, as does another daughter, Carla Krash; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
His long tenure at the firm meant that he saw it grow from just a dozen lawyers to a sprawling operation of more than 1,000.
He remained a generalist, handling some of the firm’s major clients, as well as a mentor to generations of younger lawyers — including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland.
“He never failed to emphasize to every new lawyer that Clarence Earl Gideon was the most important client the firm had ever represented,” Mr. Garland said in a statement. “Abe and the firm’s work on Gideon reaffirmed that the law protects all of us — the poor as well as the rich, the powerless as well as the powerful.”
The post Abe Krash, Who Fought for a Constitutional Right to Counsel, Dies at 97 appeared first on New York Times.