Advocate for Underdogs

Most lawyers have as much chance to appear before the Supreme Court as an airline pilot has of flying to the moon. Since February, though, a 34-year-old Stanford law professor named Anthony Amsterdam has taken four key cases to the high court. In one recent week, he appeared three times--prompting U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold to write Amsterdam a joking note, calling for an "investigation of your practice of monopolizing litigation before the Supreme Court."

Tony Amsterdam's appearance this month involved what may well be the most dramatic problem before the court.

On behalf of William Maxwell, an Arkansas black sentenced to die in the electric chair for raping a white woman, Amsterdam challenged the constitutionality of the death penalty. The young attorney reminded the court that while he represented only Maxwell, the lives of 505 other men awaiting execution throughout the U.S. could depend upon the court's decision. In his compelling brief and oral argument, Amsterdam stressed the failure of Arkansas law to provide the jury with any guiding standards when it sentenced Maxwell to execution. As a result, Amsterdam claimed, Arkansas juries have such arbitrary power that they "can take away a convicted man's life for any reason or for no reason at all--on a whim, a caprice --or because of the color of his skin."

Because the jurors decided both guilt and sentence at one sitting, Amsterdam continued, Maxwell's reliance on his privilege against self-incrimination precluded him from testifying not just on the question of guilt but on the question of punishment as well. This, said Amsterdam, deprived Maxwell of life and liberty without due process of law.

Worse Than a Dice Roll. For Tony Amsterdam, the long road to the Supreme Court in the Maxwell case began in 1966--with a phone call. Minutes after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus signed Maxwell's death warrant, George Howard Jr., an Arkansas attorney, called the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund in New York to ask for help. Amsterdam, a cooperating attorney for the L.D.F., was handed the case. In a matter of hours, he had studied the facts, mentally organized his arguments, and dictated by telephone to an Arkansas secretary the habeas corpus petition that may ultimately save Maxwell's life.

Dressed in a conservatively patterned gray-and-blue suit, Amsterdam presented his entire one-hour argument to the Supreme Court without notes. Like a prizefighter, he waited for an opening to punch his legal point home. When asked from the bench whether vague standards for juries might be no better than a dice roll or the drawing of straws, he unleashed his legal jab. "What we have now is far worse than dice or straws," he said. "At least with the dice roll or straws, a black man has an equal chance with a white man."*

Amsterdam frequently confounded Don Langston, the attorney for the State of Arkansas, with his encyclopedic recall of the law in the case. At one point, Langston, pressed by the court for a description of a state statute, confessed that his only knowledge of the particular law came through Amsterdam's exposition. And when a state attorney was asked by the court for a more exacting list of the nation's capital-punishment laws, he deferred to Amsterdam's facts and figures.

For all its impressiveness, Amsterdam's argument may be just a warmup. Observers of the court believe it to be so closely divided on the capital-punishment issue that it will decide the Maxwell case on a technicality and wait for Justice Blackmun before tackling the constitutionality of the death penalty itself. In that event, Amsterdam almost certainly will be back on behalf of another condemned man.

Unabashed Idealist. A graduate with highest honors of Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Amsterdam remains an unabashed idealist, bent on righting every legal wrong possible during his 16-to 20-hour working day. After clerking for Justice Felix Frankfurter and serving a year as Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia, he began teaching criminal law at Pennsylvania while bouncing from police court to Supreme Court in defense of civil rights workers. While still in his 20s, he distinguished himself as a legal scholar with a steady flow of law review articles.

Amsterdam has never accepted a legal fee. "I believe in the cause or the client," he says, "and either is more important than money." Yet his clients would be the envy of any criminal lawyer in the country. Besides Maxwell, Amsterdam represents New York Times Reporter Earl Caldwell, who is fighting a federal subpoena that demands his notes on the Black Panthers. He is also assisting in the appeals of Bobby Seale, William Kunstler and the Chicago Seven.

If the Supreme Court rules that juries in capital cases must have rational standards, what will Tony Amsterdam's next move be? "I admit," he says, "that I will probably be among the lawyers who will then challenge the standards as inadequate." His big passion is "underdogism." He insists that a free society must heed all views and factions. "After the revolution," says Amsterdam, "I will be representing the capitalists."

* Amsterdam co-directed a study of rape convictions in Southern states, including Arkansas, which showed conclusively that a black man convicted of rape was more likely to receive the death sentence than a white convicted of the same crime.

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