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Leonard Emlyn Davies (November 7, 1939) is an American lawyer, civil rights activist, writer, and painter whose early work defending migrant farm workers and the Black Panther Party resulted in his participation in "The Trial," the first ever criminal trial to be filmed in its entirely in the United States.

Early life
Davies was born in Weymouth, England during a German bombing raid. His Welsh father, Emlyn Davies and American mother, Neva (Snekdiker), met in New Mexico in 1934, and traveled to the U.K. in 1937. They were caught in the U.K. by the outbreak of World War II and remained the duration, Davies's father serving as an officer in a bomb disposal squad.

In 1946, Davies returned with his parents to the United States. Davies attended public schools in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico near Albuquerque and then Denver. He enlisted in the U.S. Army after graduation from Durango High School and served exclusively in the United States. He attended the University of New Mexico and then San Francisco State University, where he studied international relations.

In 1960, Davies married Susan Ayres, a descendent of two of the founding families of Durango, Colorado.

After failing the Foreign Service Exam, which his San Francisco State friend and classmate Charles Daris passed, Davies and his wife moved to Denver, Colorado, where he enrolled in the University of Denver School of Law

Civil rights career
While studying law at the University of Denver, Davies became acquainted with the noted criminologist Gresham Sykes, who enlisted him to work on a grant to provide storefront legal services in Denver. At the time, indigent and even working poor legal aid came exclusively in the form of a supine public defender office, as Davies would later argue. The experience of working with clients in the extensive Denver Black and Latino communities would shape the unfolding of Davies's subsequent legal career.

San Francisco Mime Troupe
Davies was appointed to the Colorado Bar in April of 1966. In September of that year, the Denver Young Democrats sponsored two performances at the Phipps Auditorium by the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The program was entitled "The Minstrel Show or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel." On the evening of the second performance, two plain clothed Denver Police vice squad detectives attended, directed to ascertain whether the performance was "obscene." The detectives found grounds for offense and called in support. Twelve uniformed patrolmen and two attack dogs responded. When the cast, three of the men wearing exaggerated blackface, exited at the end of the show along with the audience, they were arrested in front of the auditorium. They were charged with lewd acts and use of indecent language.

Among the three men charged was a "Beatle-haired" young creative writing student at San Francisco State University named Peter Cohon. At trial, a witness for the prosecution stated that he had taken his wife to the program, wanting to show her the sort of minstrel show he remembered seeing as a youth in Tennessee. "I'd seen minstrel shows before, but never one like that," the witness testified. His wife described the show as "vulgar, lewd, and quite profane," and that it gave her "a feeling of deep nausea." Witnesses for the defense included two Colorado state representatives and a Lutheran minister who had been in the audience. After a week-long trial before a panel three men and three women, the jury returned a verdict not-guilty to the then lone remaining charge of lewdness on the stage.

"We will return to Denver," said Cohon, one of the acquitted defendants. Cohon would soon thereafter change his name to Peter Coyote.

Over the next two years, Davies would build on his experiences and connections made at the storefront legal clinic to represent a number of the most important civil rights causes along the Eastern Slope of Colorado. Among the causes he represented were the Crusade for Justice, founded by Corky Gonzales and the cause of migrant beet harvesters working around Greeley and Ft Lupton, Colorado. Also of note was the dismissal of charges against 23 students of the University of Denver who had staged a sit in at the DU registrar's office. The charges were dismissed by the judge, who found, on the motion by the defense, that the ordinance the students were charged with violating, prohibiting loitering, annoying, disturbing the orderly conduct of classes at academic institutions had been written with only convicted sex offenders in mind.

The Trial: The City and County of Denver vs. Lauren R. Watson


On November 6, 1968 four Denver policemen subdued and arrested the Lauren R. Watson leader of the Denver Black Panther Party party and arrested him on charges of resisting arrest and resisting a police officer. The arresting officer, Robert C. Cantwell, who would go on to become director of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, claimed that Watson had been speeding and, after pulling over, had driven away, only to be further pursued by the patrolman and finally taken into custody with the assistance of other officers. Watson presented a different version. Earlier in the day, Cantwell had driven slowly in his patrol car past Watson's house, yelling to Watson, who was on his porch, about Nixon's presidential victory the day before and punctuating his harrange with a shout of "White power!"

At the time, Colorado and Texas were the only two states in the U.S. that allowed cameras into the courtroom. Only once before had any attempt been made to film and actual trial, an experiment that resulted in only partial footage taken from a hidden camera. With funding from National Education Television, the Academy Award winning documentary filmmakers Robert Fresco and Denis Sanders approached all parties involved with the controversial proposal of filming the entirety of the trial. The result, Trial: The City and County of Denver vs. Lauren R. Watson was broadcast nationally over four nights in March of 1970.

Watson was acquitted on all counts and in an interview following the verdict, made an impassioned speech. The simple verdict of not guilty, he argued, did nothing to alleviate the pain black Americans continued to suffer every day. In total, The Trial event brought national attention to questions of race, civil rights, and justice in the American courts.

Reies Tijerina and the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid


By way of his work with the Crusade for Justice, Davies was asked to represent Reies Tijerina on Federal trespassing and vandalism at Echo Amphitheater in New Mexico. These charges sprang from New Mexico state charges related to the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid. When county officials moved to break up a meeting of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes being led by Tijerina. Resistance ensued. Two Alianza members were arrested.

On the assumption that the prisoners were still being held in the Tierra Amarilla courthouse, Tijerina and his backers moved to make a citizen's arrest of the local district attorney on charges of false imprisonment and unlawful police action. The D.A., Alfonso Sánchez, was not at the courthouse when Tijerina and his supporters arrived. Versions of events differed, but all agreed that chaos ensued. Over the course of two hours, multiple shots were fired and both a prison guard and a deputy sheriff were injured.

While Tijerina famously defended himself on state charges, Davies represented him on the Federal charges brought against him at trial in the 10th Circuit, New Mexico District in Albuquerque. By that point, the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid had attracted international attention to Tijerina and his Land Grant Movement cause.

World Agricultural Systems and The Fight to Reverse Post-Harvest Losses
In the late 1970s, Davies turned his attention to a problem he had been awoken to through his defense of a Kansas wheat farmer. While the U.S. donated huge volumes of grain aid to countries in need around the world, substandard or, often more likely, nonexistent grain storage facilities would lead to loss and spoilage often amounting to 40 percent of the donated grain. Not coincidentally, that percentage of loss often equalled the shortfall from need experienced annually by the recipient countries.

The cause was evident: Suitable grain storage was expensive to build. Dockside storage, where most countries received their aid, was prohibitive.

Davies set about the problem as one of civil rights. As in his legal practice, where he found that the law was regularly not being fairly applied, particularly to the poor, minorities, and women, the fact was that the U.S. was donating sufficient grain to starving countries. The countries themselves had no way of storing the aid they received.

In 1979 TK Davies founded InterAg, a precursor to a subsequent concern, World Agricultural Systems. Beginning with coffee harvests in Colombia and sorghum harvests in Mexico, he began experimenting with various extremely low-cost ways of storing harvested grains. In the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, blowers piled sorghum silage to be covered by a specially fabricated type of tarpaulin and condensed with metal cords strung through locally obtained waste tires.

In his research Davies came across an Idahoan engineer named David South who had converted his childhood fascination with domes to found Monolithic Dome, a company he began by building a 35 foot high dome potato storage structure near his home. While he was expanding principally into economic cold storage, South immediately saw how his patented structure with its low cost and low technological entry point would be ideally suited for use as a grain storage facility in a developing country. With a grant from U.S. A.I.D., Davies and South and their teams settled on Souma, Algeria for their test project.

In a short period of time and on a shoestring budget, the huge volume of cement need for the structure, for example, was produced in a portable mixer, the project, a 60 foot tall solid clad cement dome, was completed. As negotiations were underway for the next Algerian facility, the political situation in the country deteriorated. At one point, in meeting with the newly installed Secretary of the Interior for Algeria, Davies was accused of being an agent for the CIA and stealing documents. Davies left the country shortly thereafter on the advice of the ambassador; by December of that year the country had slipped into civil war.

Return to the Law
Back in Colorado, Davies was again drawn into high profile cases that emanated from the penny stock scandals. Joseph Pignatiello had been swept up in an FBI sting operation related to the fraudulent promotion of penny stocks.

In 2001, Davies represented Meyer Blinder, the self-proclaimed "King of the Penny Stocks" a penny stock trader.

Davies last major case was the much-publicized "Black Widow" trial in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where he represented multiple murder suspect Jill Coit's accused co-conspirator, Michael Backus. Coit, who had been married by one count ten times, allegedly beat, stun-gunned, and shot her penultimate husband in a dispute over a lien the victim, Gerry Boggs, had on Coit's bed and breakfast, which he had invested in when the coupled were married. Notably, the bed and breakfast was run principally by Coit's son, Seth. Seth Coit became a principal witness for the prosecution, though doubts lingered over the blanket immunity he was granted. Despite suspicions, Seth Coit testified that his mother had asked him to murder Boggs. On cross-examination, he denied directly having played any role in Boggs's murder.

Michael Backus claimed that he and Jill Coit were camping in Kelly Flats, two and a half hours away, 6,600 feet in altitude, and in late October. Davies made several motions to separate the cases but all were denied. Backus was submitted to a trial that mainly regarded the extraordinary career of his co-defendant. Genuine questions existed as to whether Backus participated in the murder. Nevertheless, Backus refused to testify against Coit. The two were found guilty. Backus is currently serving a sentence of life without parole at the Limon Correctional Facility in Limon, Colorado.

Books
At the instigation of Prentice Hall publishers Davies wrote a history and hornbook of cross-examination, taking his cue from the originally definitive work in the field, The Art of Cross-Examination by Francis L. Wellman. Davies's book, Anatomy of Cross-Examination, was published in 1996. Davies also published a novel in 2000 based, in part, on his experiences with Reies Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, Sangre de Cristo, in 2000.

Painting


After his full retirement from legal practice Davies returned to a lifelong interest in painting and began studying plein air and Western landscape work. His work has been featured in group shows at the Durango Arts Center and two solo shows at the Galeries of the Abiquiu Inn.