Adventures In Court: 11 True Stories Based On Fascinating Cases

By Paul W. Orth

After receiving an honorable discharge from the United States Army, Paul W. Orth went on to Hartford, CT to find employment in a law firm. He was soon hired by Hoppin, Carey & Powell, a medium-sized general practice firm. Four years later, he became a full partner and was responsible for the firm's court work. He had a variety of unusual civil and criminal cases over the following years, some by court appointment and many by private clients and charitable organizations. "Adventures in Court" follows the stories of Orth's law career specializing in appellate work.
He has argued some three dozen cases before the state's Supreme Court and a dozen in federal courts of appeal. In 1976, he attained a personal goal of arguing a landmark case before the United States Supreme Court - and winning it. He was an adjunct professor of trusts and then of legal writing at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Around 1983, he was elected president of the Hartford County Bar Association, later received the Connecticut Bar Association's annual legal services award, and has been a fellow of the American Bar Association for over thirty years. In 1987, his firm merged with Shipman & Goodwin, LLP, where he specialized in

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350910063

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Adventures In Court

11 True Stories Based On Fascinating Cases

©2023 Paul W. Orth

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

print ISBN: 979-8-35091-005-6

ebook ISBN: 979-8-35091-006-3

Contents

PREFACE

MY FIRST FEDERAL COURT APPOINTMENT: DEFEND THE WHITE LIGHTNING CRIMINAL

FRANK SMITH, CONVICTED MURDERER, FILES HIS OWN HABEAS CORPUS PETITION; MY SECOND FEDERAL COURT APPOINTMENT

JOHN FITCH, GLAMOROUS RACER WITH A FLAIR FOR DANGER, DIES AT 95, HEADLINED THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARY; HE ALSO DEVELOPED LIME ROCK RACEWAY AND THE FITCH INERTIAL BARRIER

FOUR CATHOLIC COLLEGES TAP THE PUBLIC TREASURY IN VIOLATION OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND HIRE FAMOUS ATTORNEY TO DEFEND THEM

SIX STATE EMPLOYEES BALK AT REVERSE SEX DISCRIMINATION IN BENEFITS AND THE SUPREME COURT FACES FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT VERSUS ELEVENTH AMENDMENT MONETARY RELIEF ISSUES

DEFENSE OF A MURDERER FOR $50

PREACHER ACCUSED OF ARSON USES BIZARRE DEFENSE ATTORNEY; MY THIRD FEDERAL COURT APPOINTMENT

A ROUTINE DIVORCE OF THE WEALTHY WITH A WINE ASSASSINATION

TRIAL OF DISCHARGED EMPLOYEE’S AGE DISCRIMINATION CASE; OFFENDING EMPLOYER REVAMPS HUMAN RELATIONS DEPARTMENT

DIVORCE CASE ENDS BADLY WITH CHILDREN KIDNAPPED BY MOTHER; STRANGE LATER DEVELOPMENTS

I WITNESS A WAR CRIMES TRIAL IN HARTFORD AND A CONVINCING IDENTIFICATION OF A HOLOCAUST PERPETRATOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

In law school I developed some personal goals having to do with courts and my career. In the practice of law I had the good fortune to handle a variety of unique cases. Ten of these cases are summarized in the Table of Contents and in the final long paragraph of this preface. They make the telling of these stories richer in the context of some of my biography. So I offer the following about myself.

I was born in 1930 as the only son of an attorney in Harrisburg, PA. My mother was a concert pianist who had won a major piano competition in Boston, concertized for a few years, and then joined the music faculty at Smith College in Northampton, MA, for several years before her marriage. My father died suddenly in 1939 due to medical malpractice, and my mother moved back to Northampton to become a piano teacher in the vibrant small city she adored. There, I was a good student and was likely to be valedictorian of my high school class. My mother thought I should have the best education and persuaded me to interview for admission to Phillips Exeter Academy. I spent my senior year there on full scholarship. I then went to Dartmouth College, again on full scholarship. I loved my time at Dartmouth, majored in economics, and in my last year decided to go to Harvard Law School. I was admitted, and, after mid-year and final exams, I knew I could survive the rigors of that fabled law school.

First, I had to become better acquainted with both a great university and a great city, along with the cultures of both. Monitoring some classes given by star historians, using student tickets to the Boston Symphony, and going to the Museum of Fine Arts and to the Gardner Museum are prominent examples. I missed making music, so at the start of my second year, I auditioned for a trombonist’s position with the Harvard-Radcliffe Symphony Orchestra, which was then conducted by a concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. I had stimulating rehearsals one evening each week. No one else from the law school had joined up. Secondly and back to the law school itself, I found that it had no course in legal ethics at that time. There was, however, the Ames moot court program, started in a law student’s second year, where clubs of about a half-dozen students each, presented by written briefs and by oral arguments hypothetical cases modeled after real cases. In the third year the clubs were whittled down to two opposing teams, which would then argue before three prominent judges. Usually a United States Supreme Court Justice would preside in a large room with two Court of Appeals Judges also sitting. A fellow student and I had lost in our first round, but we lost to the team that ended up winning the competition the next year. I loved the program and thinking on my feet and developed some aspirations involving trials and courtrooms.

Another event portending my future was that the professor who taught constitutional law did not progress beyond initial jurisdictional issues. We discussed only the power of a court to consider the proper parties and the correct court and not the subject matter of a case. In other words, for months my class learned only technical matters and no substantive constitutional law. Imagine going to Harvard Law School in the class of 1954 and having no real exposure to the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, which in May 1954, outlawed racial segregation in public schools based on the Fourteenth Amendment.

However, my student draft deferment expired upon my graduation in June so I was drafted and on August 1 bussed to Fort Dix, NJ for basic training. That led to being awakened at 5 a.m. each morning by a loud whistle, the delightful greeting, fall out, Mother Fuckers, and then running to do a variety of unacceptable demands, such as crawling under barbed wire in the dirt with bullets flying above.

The Army’s total interruption of my career did have a few benefits, however, such as:

in October 1954 I went to Baltimore, MD for three months of training by the Army’s Counterintelligence Corps (CIC);

in March 1955 I had a stormy voyage on a creaky World War II troopship from Brooklyn, NY to Bremerhaven, Germany;

in April I was permanently assigned as a CIC agent to the southern region in Munich, Germany;

in July I was temporarily assigned for ninety days to the Army’s German language school in Oberammergau, with housing in the plush barracks that had been built for German ski troops;

in August and September I had to undergo multiple visits to the Oktoberfest in Munich, travel to France and England, and attend several operas in Salzburg, Austria;

on January 15, 1956, just after midnight, I was destined to meet a beautiful blonde university student at a Faschingsball at the modern art museum in Munich and had to dance with her for three hours;

on January 19, I had a first date with said student on her birthday and attended the opera, The Barber of Seville by Rossini;

on March 12, Ilse accepted my marriage proposal, and I had to give her a ring;

on June 15, we were married in a civil ceremony and I lost my top secret security clearance;

on June 16, we were married in a chapel on the Munich army base and were afterwards serenaded by a large infantry band before leaving for a honeymoon in Switzerland and Paris;

in July I pulled KP (Kitchen Police) for a month on the base;

on August 1, 1956, I was honorably discharged from the army and happily left non-scenic Fort Dix, NJ.

I then went to Hartford, CT to find a job with a reputable law firm, where I could absorb some professional ethics by observing established practitioners at work. Resumé in hand, I visited preselected law firms and asked for the hiring partner. I usually obtained immediate interviews and in a week or two I received offers from three: Day, Berry and Howard, Robinson and Cole, and Hoppin, Carey and Powell. The first two seemed too big for my taste since each had about twenty lawyers. Bill Hoppin and Bob Powell particularly impressed me; and Donald Lee Rome, my friend and law school classmate, lauded them and their three partners. The firm had one other associate. I accepted their offer and became the firm’s seventh attorney. Seven is my lucky number! I did a bit