Earl Rogers

Earl Rogers (November 18, 1869 – February 22, 1922) was an American trial lawyer and professor. Rogers became the inspiration for Erle Stanley Gardner's fictional character Perry Mason. He was also posthumously inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame.

Life
Earl Rogers was born in Perry, New York on November 18, 1869, the son of Methodist minister Lowell L. Rogers and Ada (Andrus) Rogers. The Reverend Rogers moved the Rogers family to California in 1874. Rogers attended Ashland Academy in Ashland, Oregon and St. Helena Academy in St. Helena, California. He then studied at Syracuse University, but left to return to California after his father went bankrupt.

Although Rogers had wanted to be a surgeon, by his late teens Rogers was married and working as a Los Angeles newspaper reporter. This brought him into contact with the courts, and he began reading law under former U.S. senator Stephen M. White and Judge William P. Gardiner. Rogers was admitted to the bar in 1897, and began to practice in Los Angeles. Rogers did not like criminal law because it was less prestigious than civil practice; but after only two years as an attorney, he won an amazing verdict by proving self-defense in the case of William Alford, a plumber who killed Jay E. Hunter, one of the town’s leading attorneys. Among the students who later studied law under Rogers was Buron Fitts, who became a Los Angeles County district attorney.

As a defense counsel, Rogers handled 77 murder trials and lost only three, out of 183 acquittals over his career with fewer than 20 convictions, even though most of his clients were actually guilty. He astonished medical experts on the witness stand with his technical questions. His expertise was so complete that he became a professor of medical jurisprudence and insanity in the College of Physicians and Surgeons as well as a professor at the University of Southern California Law School.

He was respected for his legal skill, with a good memory for detail, but did research in secret, letting colleagues believe he had known his legal references all along. However his most important skill was his acting, which was rehearsed to appear spontaneous before the jury. One tactic after particularly damaging testimony by a prosecution witness, was to rise and create a scene, inevitably being warned of contempt by the court, but making the jury forget the point of evidence that had been made minutes earlier.

At the time he was retained by Clarence Darrow at the peak of his career, he was earning $100,000 per year, but had begun heavy drinking, sobering up in Turkish baths in order to get back to the courtroom for his next case. Another well-known defense attorney, New Yorker  William Fallen  (who defended gangster Arnold Rothstein during the Black Sox Scandal after the 1919 World Series), was quoted as saying "Even when he's drunk, Earl Rogers is better than any other stone-sober lawyer in the whole damned country".

But a few years after the Darrow case, he lost a client to execution, and by 1919 his drinking resulted in few clients. He did win his last trial, keeping himself from being committed to an insane asylum.

He died at age 52 in a Los Angeles rooming house on February 22, 1922; The New York Times obituary was only 35 words.

His daughter Adela Rogers St. Johns was his assistant during his early career, and she later became a well-known correspondent for William Randolph Hearst (a friend of her father), and a writer for Photoplay. In 1927 she published A Free Soul, a novel where the lawyer-hero wins his most famous case and dies collapsing on the courtroom floor in triumph. The book had appeared in serial form from September 1926 to February 1927 in Hearst's International with Cosmopolitan magazine, and also resulted in a 1928 play and a 1931 movie of the same name, starring Lionel Barrymore with Clark Gable as a gangster. That movie was voted "One of the Ten Best Pictures of 1931" in a poll by Film Daily.

The California attorney and author Earl Stanley Gardner published his first Perry Mason pulp-fiction story in 1933, inspired by the success and techniques of Rogers, but filled with details and locations from Gardner's life. The character later appeared in more than 80 novels by Gardner, as well as Warner Brothers feature films in the 1930's, a CBS Radio program from 1943 to 1955, and a CBS Television program beginning in 1957.

His daughter Adela published a biography of her father in 1962 titled Final Verdict. It was adapted for a TNT television film of the same name in 1991.

William Alford, 1899
In the case of William Alford, a plumber armed with a pistol charged with killing Jay E. Hunter, a prominent attorney who only had a cane, Rogers had a difficult case. Although Alford insisted that he had fired in self-defense only after the attorney had beaten him to the ground, the coroner testified that the bullet had driven downward through Hunter’s body.

The trial was not going well when Rogers insisted upon a tactic to give his expert witness a more dramatic presentation: he asked that Hunter’s intestines to be brought into the court. The prosecution of course objected, but eventually the exhibit was produced, and the expert was able to argue that the bullet had actually traveled upward, in which case Hunter would have had to be bending over (wielding his cane) just as Alford had claimed.

Alford was acquitted and Earl Rogers became famous, which was not disagreeable to him. From then on Rogers specialized in criminal law.

Charles F. Mootry, 1899
Rogers defended Charles F. Mootry from a charge of murdering his wife by appealing to the jurors' own feelings about their wives. After the trial, when Mootry tried to congratulate Rogers, he turned away from Mootry and said, "Get away from me, you slimy pimp; you're as guilty as hell and you know it."

The Catalina Island murder 1902
Rogers is also remembered for the defense in the Catalina Island murder case. In the early morning of August 13, 1902, at the Metropole Hotel, a gambler, William A. Yeagar, better known as "the Louisville Sport," was murdered during a card game. Alfred Boyd was one of three men in the room playing poker. Harry Johnson, who was at the table, ran from the room, yelling "He shot him, he shot him!" and handed Boyd's gun to bartender Jim Davis, who thought that there was no question that Boyd was the killer. Boyd was charged with the murder, but Rogers won an acquittal.

Griffith J. Griffith, 1903
Colonel Griffith J. Griffith, the namesake of Griffith Park, was tried for the attempted murder of his wife; Rogers used the alcoholic insanity defense where it was argued as a mental illness, not a crime or an indulgence. Griffith was convicted of the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon and served two years in prison.

Morris Buck, 1906
In 1906, Rogers made one of his rare appearances for the prosecution and used his medical expertise to send Morris Buck to the gallows for the murder of Chloe Canfield, wife of Charles A. Canfield (1848-1913).

Patrick Calhoun 1909
Patrick Calhoun, president of the United Railroad Company, was charged with bribing the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in exchange for granting the overhead trolley franchise to his company in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Rogers defended Calhoun, but during his trials and all the related trials of United Railroad Company's general counsel, Tiery Ford, Rogers did not call a single witness nor introduce any evidence, arguing that the prosecution simply hadn't made a case against the defendants. On June 20, 1909, the Calhoun jury was deadlocked, with the final jury vote at ten for acquittal and two for conviction. He was not retried.

Clarence Darrow, 1912–1913
Perhaps the most famous lawyer–client disagreements recorded in legal history were those which developed between Clarence Darrow, indicted for attempted jury bribery in Los Angeles in 1912, and Earl Rogers. The case arose out of Darrow's defense of the McNamara brothers, labor leaders who were indicted in the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times building, in which 21 Times non-union employees were killed.

The McNamara brothers were indicted, and Clarence Darrow was brought in to defend them. The case gripped the attention of the entire nation. Before the McNamara brothers could plead guilty, however, Darrow himself was charged by the Los Angeles district attorney with an attempt to bribe a juror. Darrow then hired Rogers as his chief counsel.

When the case went to trial, however, Darrow frequently disagreed with his attorney over how the case should be tried. According to the account of Adela Rogers St. Johns, much of her father's energy during the trial was given over to trying to persuade Darrow and his wife to accept his position on how to try the case.

Rogers was successful in getting Darrow, the great champion of organized labor, to refrain from making an argument essentially condoning the dynamiting of the Times building and the killing of 21 people. Rogers and Darrow both made closing arguments. Rogers's short summary of the evidence was business-like and to the point, emphasizing his own theory of the case that Darrow was too smart to have been involved in a bribery scheme and that he would not in any event have knowingly run across the street at the scene of the bribery and thus drawn attention to his presence at the scene.

Darrow was acquitted, but he was later indicted for allegedly attempting to bribe another juror in the McNamara case. Rogers began the second case as lead counsel but was soon forced to withdraw for health reasons. The second bribery trial ended in a hung jury, with several jurors holding out for a conviction.

It was not until many months later that the second indictment was finally dismissed, based on Darrow's agreement never to practice law in California again. The most difficult advocating that Earl Rogers faced in the Darrow case was to persuade Darrow not to continually hurt his own case with unappealing – if not suicidal – arguments."

The actor Robert Vaughn played Rogers in the episode, "Defendant: Clarence Darrow" (January 13, 1963), of the CBS anthology series, GE True, hosted by Jack Webb. In the story line, Darrow, played by Tol Avery, and Rogers argue passionately over legal procedures.

Jess Willard 1913
Rogers defended boxer Jess Willard on charges of second-degree murder stemming from the death of his opponent, John "Bull" Young, from a blow to the head in the eleventh round of a boxing match on August 22, 1913. On January 13, 1914, a jury found Willard not guilty. Willard later went on to become heavyweight champion of the world.

Charles E. Sebastian, 1916
Rogers successfully defended Los Angeles Police Chief Charles E. Sebastian against a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the 16-year-old sister of his mistress, while he was running for mayor. Before that, after declaring his candidacy, he had been indicted on a concocted charge (later dropped) in the beating death of a disabled homeless man, and then after being elected, charged with setting up a fake assassination attempt on himself during the campaign for publicity; also dropped. However, he left City Hall on September 2, 1916, after only a year in office, after a newspaper printed his love letters to the mistress in which he called his wife “the Old Haybag.” Earl Rogers ran the mayor's office for a few days until Frederic T. Woodman was appointed acting mayor on September 5, 1916.