Michael A. Hardy, a fervent civil rights lawyer who for more than three decades defended the Rev. Al Sharpton as his faithful counsel and confidante, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 69.
His death, from cancer, was announced by the National Action Network, the Harlem-based civil rights organization that Mr. Sharpton founded in 1991. Mr. Hardy had served as its general counsel and executive vice president almost from its inception.
Mr. Hardy was notably involved in defending Mr. Sharpton in a defamation lawsuit brought by a local prosecutor whom Mr. Sharpton had said was one of six white men who kidnapped and raped Tawana Brawley, a 15-year-old Black girl, in upstate New York in 1987. A grand jury determined that Ms. Brawley’s account was a hoax.
Mr. Hardy’s legal dexterity also figured in successful challenges to the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk strategy, which its critics said unfairly targeted Black and Latino men. And his work helped lead to bans against certain methods of police restraint in the wake of the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed Black man who was stopped on a Staten Island sidewalk in 2014 on suspicion of illegally selling cigarettes.
“When Michael started, it was unheard of to get police prosecuted; at the end of his life we see police getting convicted,” Mr. Sharpton said in a phone interview. “He was the legal mind of the 21st century civil rights movement.”
At first glance, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Sharpton seemed an unlikely duo. Mr. Sharpton grew up in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, attended public schools and briefly enrolled in Brooklyn College. Mr. Hardy hailed from a middle-class Brooklyn family and was educated in prestigious and overwhelmingly white institutions: Northfield Mount Hermon, a preparatory school in Massachusetts, and Carleton College in Minnesota.
But both shared a commitment to the downtrodden, to equal opportunity and fair treatment regardless of race, and to the ascendancy of Mr. Sharpton, who, as Mr. Hardy once put it, was “blessed by some greater power.” Mr. Sharpton went on to briefly seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and become a political commentator and program host on MSNBC.
For all the times Mr. Sharpton was arrested earlier in his career, Mr. Hardy routinely kept him out of jail — except when Mr. Sharpton wanted to remain incarcerated as a form of protest — by persuading the authorities to reduce or dismiss charges. After the federal government ended a criminal tax investigation against Mr. Sharpton in 2008, Mr. Hardy said his client had been cleared of any speculation that he had personally profited from funds raised for his nonprofit civil rights group.
Mr. Hardy’s most visible role was defending Mr. Sharpton in the defamation lawsuit brought by Steven A. Pagones, a Dutchess County assistant prosecutor who was implicated by Mr. Sharpton and two lawyers for Ms. Brawley as one of the six white men who, Ms. Brawley said, had sexually assaulted her.
In 1988, Mr. Pagones was exonerated by a grand jury, which also concluded that Ms. Brawley had fabricated the incident to avoid being punished by her stepfather after running away from home for four days. Mr. Pagones sued. The lawsuit went to trial in late 1997.
Mr. Sharpton, who had inserted himself into the Brawley case as a civil rights activist, “never did anything more than call for an investigation — that’s not defamation,” Mr. Hardy maintained.
“All the Rev. Sharpton did say was there was evidence that Mr. Pagones may have been involved in the Miss Brawley matter,” he added.
Mr. Hardy sought to convince the jury that Mr. Sharpton had a reasonable basis to believe Ms. Brawley’s account.
Mr. Hardy bristled when Mr. Pagones’s lawyer compared Mr. Sharpton to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. Rather, Mr. Hardy argued, his client had been a voice of moderation, a conciliator who had “prevented riots” and who, just the day before, had preached at the funeral of a Black man who had been shot in an altercation with the police.
“Is that the action of a Nazi, someone like Goebbels?,” he asked.
The trial was circuslike, with lots of yelling by lawyers and the judge briefly holding Mr. Hardy in contempt after Mr. Pagones claimed that Mr. Hardy had been spitting at him during questioning.
The jury concluded that Mr. Pagones had been defamed and awarded him $345,000 in damages: $95,000 from Alton H. Maddox Jr., a Brawley lawyer who had represented Mr. Sharpton before he recruited Mr. Hardy in 1991; $185,000 from a second Brawley lawyer, C. Vernon Mason; and $65,000 from Mr. Sharpton. Mr. Sharpton’s lesser penalty allowed Mr. Hardy to claim a victory of sorts.
Mr. Hardy, who had once briefly considered a career in the theater, was a virtuoso performer during the trial. “I see the courtroom as my stage,” he told The New York Times in 1998. He twice became teary in saying that imposing monetary damages on his client would send a message that “Black people in America have no rights.” But the judgment stood. Mr. Sharpton finally paid in full in 2001.
David Anthony Hardy was born on July 2, 1955, in Brooklyn to William Hardy Sr., a supervisor at the LaSalle Paper Co., and Carmen (Sanchez) Hardy, a public-school teacher.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Carleton College in 1977, Mr. Hardy worked as an analyst for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and as a special assistant to the city’s Tax Commission until 1983.
While attending New York Law School, he edited a newspaper put out by the small New Alliance Party before earning his law degree in 1988 (the same year that the now-defunct New Alliance managed to place the psychologist Lenora B. Fulani on the ballot for president in all 50 states). He said he had gravitated to the party because the main political parties were not doing enough to cultivate Black leadership.
As a lawyer, Mr. Hardy at times took on cases that seemed at odds with his family history. He represented drug dealers, though his older brother ran a drug-treatment program. He defended a man who fatally shot his former girlfriend, though one of Mr. Hardy’s two sisters was killed in a similar crime in 1984. The man was convicted.
Mr. Hardy was named to several quasi-government study committees, including one by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo that looked at raising the age at which children charged with crimes could be treated as adults; another looked at ways to discourage fare-beating on mass transit.
His survivors include his wife, Dr. Robin Brown Hardy; and a sister, Gena LaTouche.
Mr. Hardy joined Mr. Sharpton at the infant National Action Network in 1991 after leaving the New Alliance Party over policy disagreements.
Their long alliance proved mutually beneficial.
“He could help me go where I wanted to go, and I could help him go where he wanted to go,” Mr. Sharpton once said of Mr. Hardy. “In many ways, he was the perfect balance for me. I can talk to him about addressing certain audiences and situations that he would be more familiar with, from growing up in his social life.”
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