"There Is No Better Than Me"

A few weeks ago, Lawyer Percy Foreman wearily confided to a friend that James Earl Ray would be his last client in a criminal case. From now on, said Foreman, he would confine his activities to only a few civil suits. "I am 66 years old," he explained, "and I don't need money. So why should I expose myself to the agony of criminal cases?" Last week, however, after successfully copping a controversial plea for Ray, Foreman was obviously feeling perkier; he denied categorically that he had any notion of retiring from criminal practice.

No matter what he does, Foreman already has established for himself a permanent place in the legal profession's hall of fame. "There is no better trial lawyer in the U.S. than me," he says unblushingly. And he may well be right. During a career covering more than 40 years, he has served as defense counsel in at least 1,500 capital cases in hometown Houston and other cities. By his own count, a mere 64 of his clients were sentenced to prison and only one was executed. That was a convicted killer named Steve Mitchell, who Foreman still insists was "as sweet and kind a person as ever lived."

Without Laughter. In the courtroom, Percy comes across at first as a fit figure for ridicule--a shambling hulk (6 ft. 4 in., 250 Ibs.) of a man with baggy pants. But his opponents know better than to laugh. Foreman combines a superbly skilled legal mind with a brilliant sense of showmanship. In one case, he defended a woman who had killed her husband, a cattleman, because he had flogged her with a whip. As he addressed the jury, Foreman kept picking up the long black whip from the counsel table and cracking it ferociously. By the time he was through, the jury seemed willing to award the lady a Medal of Honor.

Another Foreman client was a woman named Mahotah Muldrow. She and her husband got into an argument; he belted her around a bit. Thereupon she shot him five times and then left him for dead in the front yard. She drove" herself to the police station to turn herself in but, for some reason, changed her mind and went back home. There, in the presence of several neighbors, who by now had gathered around Mr. Muldrow's body, Mahotah fired a sixth shot. Foreman won an acquittal by convincing the jury that the first five shots had been fired in self-defense and that the sixth was 1) the result of some sort of nervous reaction, and 2) had missed.

A favorite Foreman tactic is to argue that a murder victim was a rascal who badly needed killing. That was part of his strategy in the celebrated 1966 mariticide trial of Candy Mossler in Miami. Foreman repeated time and again that the late Jacques Mossler had been a "depraved" sexual deviate who might have been killed by any number of people.

High Mission. There have been a good many forks in the road to Percy Foreman's present state of eminence. The son of a small-town Texas sheriff, Percy was one of eight children. He went to work at the tender age of eight, tried everything from shining shoes to professional wrestling. During his years at the University of Texas Law School, he turned his natural talent for oratory into tuition fees by hitting the Chautauqua trail, lecturing widely on such subjects as "The High Mission of Women in the 20th Century" and "How to Get the Most Out of Life." After getting his law degree at the age of 25, he served briefly as an assistant county prosecutor before entering into private practice.

Foreman is a man of bewildering contradictions. His personal charm, when he cares to exercise it, is overwhelming; yet he has been known to snarl at dilatory waitresses: "I get $200 an hour, and you have taken up $60 worth." In the courtroom, he would almost literally die for his clients; during conferences in their cells, he often cusses them up one side and down the other. With the well-heeled, he is merciless about fees. They must be paid in either cash or property (he owns numerous cars and houses turned over to him in fee settlements). However, if a case involving an impoverished person interests him, he will undertake it for nothing. Even though his work keeps him away from home for long periods, Foreman is a strong family man who dotes on his eleven-year-old daughter. His second wife is former German Screen Actress Marguerite Obert; he also has an adopted son.

In the Dead of Night. Foreman can be cynical about the law. It is, he says, quoting Aaron Burr, "whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained." He is, in fact, dedicated to the law and is one of its hardest-working practitioners. Foreman's Houston office consists of himself and a secretary, and Percy does almost all of his own investigating. Says Houston's Bill Walsh, a lawyer who has known Foreman for many years: "While other lawyers are at home and asleep in bed, Percy's out in the dead of night, trudging around in the rain looking for witnesses."

Although he has made a career out of defending accused killers, Foreman is genuinely horrified at the act of killing. His aversion applies not only to any state-ordered execution of his clients but goes so far as to include game hunters. Foreman takes genuine pleasure in telling the story of a deer hunter who, while sitting in the branches of a tree, fell out and impaled himself on the antlers of a deer he had meant to shoot. That, says Foreman, was "divine justice."

Last week, after the Ray trial and while still in the process of changing his mind about retiring from criminal practice, Foreman sat, stripped to his undershirt, on the edge of his Memphis hotel-room bed. There, he held court for fascinated newsmen and expounded his theories about the declining art of criminal-law practice. Most of today's young lawyers, he said, are much too gutless to take on criminal cases. "They are afraid to leave the library for fear they'll make a public ass of themselves in court." Perhaps it is because of this shortage of guts that Percy Foreman has recently had some second thoughts about retiring.

-Since Candy's acquittal, she and Foreman have had a bitter falling out. She has brought a lawsuit against him to recover assorted jewels that he had collected from her before the trial as security for his fee. In turn, Foreman is asking that a jury decide what he will be paid for defending Candy.

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