29 Apr Criminal Defense Lawyer Relishes Chance to do Battle

At the end of a day spent bouncing like a pinball around Baltimore’s criminal justice system, Jack Rubin, defense attorney, is consoling himself with past victories.

There’s the 18-year-old Delaware kid who blew his best friend’s head off after looting his bank account, confessed to police and got life without parole. On appeal, Mr. Rubin got the confession and the conviction thrown out.

This,” he says, slapping a pile of briefs from the Delaware murder, “is a great case. This is a beautiful case.” There’s the reputed Baltimore drug enforcer, charged with both narcotics and murder. He beat the drug charges, and the state offered to drop the murder case, but with the right to revive it in the future.

“I didn’t want that hanging over my client,” he says. He rolled the dice and turned down the deal, risking a murder trial. The state dropped the charges.

There’s the Baltimore County lawyer, caught with a king’s ransom in cocaine in his golf bag, who walked out of the courthouse with probation.

“He paid me one third of his fee and declared bankruptcy,” Mr. Rubin says, brown eyes ablaze, round face supported by an ample double chin. “Isn’t that unbelievable? Isn’t that gratitude?”

Few trades rankle the popular mind more than that of the criminal defense lawyer.

As long ago as 1933, H.I. Mencken was complaining about “the professional criminal” who escaped punishment “aided boldly by the kind of shyster lawyer he employs.” Six decades later, the image has not improved. In this city of narcotics-fueled mayhem, the defense attorney is seen as working to keep the streets unsafe.

Jack Barry Rubin has no apologies. At 51, he has been doing this work for half his life. He does it at the fierce pace of about 50 court appearances a month, nearly a score of jury trials a year. By all accounts, he does it very well. Which means, of course, more of his clients walk.

“I have never acquitted anybody,” Mr. Rubin says. “if making the state prove its case is unreasonable, I’m unreasonable.”

“Grapevine in the jail is real good,” he says.

He says it sitting in the kitchen of his town house in Pikesville. It is 7:30. To prove his point, now comes the day’s second call.

“Your son got locked up again.” The voice is neutral, no condemnation, no sympathy.

“He’s already out on bail for a felony, right? . . . Whether he had something on him or not isn’t always relevant. . . . Can’t promise we’ll be there for the bail review, ma’am. But check with pretrial and tell them represent him.”

This will be an ordinary, frustrating day: no tear-stained pleas for mercy, no courtroom confessions, just a couple of postponements, a waived hearing, an arraignment, and one successful invocation of The Idiot Defense.

There is the usual scheduling catastrophe. Mr. Rubin is due on three cases in two courtrooms, at different ends of Baltimore, at 9 a.m. — heroin at Wabash Avenue, marijuana and PCP in the Southern District.

He is due downtown in Circuit Court at 10 with a young woman who was discovered in March in a car with a bullet in the chest and 1,100 glassine bags of heroin. He has a cocaine case, on North Avenue, at 2.

From the phone in his silver BMW, he shuffles cases. He makes a call on a nursing home aide accused of rape by a senile 92-year-old woman.

He breezes through the District Court at Wabash Avenue, booming greetings at the sheriffs deputies, patting the backs of fellow members of the bar, shaking hands with a passing police officer.

On the second floor. in the prosecutors’ office, he stops to spar with M.J. Schroeder about a case.

“Hand-to-hand sale to an undercover officer of, what was it, 30 grams of heroin?” Ms. Schroeder says, a little taunt in her voice.

“It’s called entrapment, my dear,” Mr. Rubin replies, pinching her cheek as he strolls out the door.

“Entrapment my toenails!” Ms. Schroeder calls after him, as the door swings shut.

‘I always liked talking’

His first job was sales. At 13, he started selling shoes at a store on Lexington Street for 60 cents an hour and 1 percent commission, Monday

and Thursday nights and Saturdays. From a city in a more innocent era, the worst thing he can remember doing was replacing the teacher’s hand cream with Elmer’s glue.

He liked school — “it was an opportunity to talk, and I always liked talking” – and finished City College at 16. His father was increasingly disabled by heart trouble, and he kept working as he moved through the University of Baltimore and its law school.

Five days a week he investigated child abuse cases for the city, sharing a desk for a time with now-Senator Barbara A. Mikulski. Saturdays he sold clothes. Sundays he scrubbed floors at the Maryland Cup Company. When he got his degree, he practiced personal injury law for six months, but didn’t like it. He wanted trial work. He wanted battle.

He could have had that as a prosecutor, of course. But he wanted to give his own children an easier ride than he had. “To be a state’s attorney it helped to have some money, which I didn’t,” he said. From his childhood, and from his child abuse work, he had an easy rapport with people from tough neighborhoods. He opted for criminal defense work.

On occasion, he finds the job less legal work than social work, putting in long hours disentangling a client’s life. On occasion, Mr. Rubin said, he has a client who, presumption of innocence aside, he finds it difficult to abide. “I’m not a potted plant. Sometimes you say to yourself during a trial, ‘God. I can’t wait for this case to end, because V don’t want to sit next to him any longer.'”

He sits there anyway. Like nearly all criminal defense attorneys, he takes his fee up front.

If I were representing the president of General Motors, I could bill by the hour and be confident I would be paid,” he says. “But if a guy gets 15 years, he’s not going to write you a check from the Fallsway Apartments.” The Maryland State Penitentiary and the Baltimore City Detention Center both have a view of the FalIsway.

Criminal defense law is far from the most lucrative branch of legal practice. For Mr. Rubin, whose wife, Carol, practices civil health-care law, it has helped put his two daughters through private school and private college; pay for the original art that hangs on his living room wall; and finance a trip to Europe about once a year.

He declines to discuss his fees. But handy on his desk he keeps a copy of a legal manual explaining the use of IRS Form 8300, which is used to report cash transactions of more than $10,000. “This is my Bible,” he says.

Drug money prompted the IRS regulation. Mr. Rubin does not inquire about the source of his fees.

“A merchant doesn’t ask where the money comes from,” he says. “A guy who sells a BMW for $15,000 cash doesn’t ask where the money comes from.”

‘He’s an idiot’

At 2 p.m., he is headed for North Avenue, none of his cases resolved. He has spent much of the day waiting in the district court, listening to the surreal song of the city’s underside:

Prosecutor: “Did he hit her only with his fists, or did he use some object?”

Witness: “He hit her with a pumpkin.”

Judge (starting from a daydream): “A pumpkin?”

Witness: “A pumpkin.”

At the Circuit Court arraignment, he has managed a long bench conference with prosecutor and judge. He wants to convey that his client, the 22-year-old woman caught with the bullet and the heroin, is an innocent who landed by way of a drug habit in a dealers’ dispute. Sitting on a bench with hands and legs cuffed, she indeed looks out of place, like a college student acting in a play.

The conference is not wasted time. “You want a plant to grow,” Mr. Rubin says, “you have to plant a seed.”

He eats lunch — turkey on rye and a diet Coke — in the office with a client, a very pregnant young woman who is facing serious drug charges. She has brought a friend who will take care of the baby if she goes to prison. Another client drops by, simply to tell his former lawyer he is doing well and hopes not to need his services again.

At North Avenue, he has to explain to the judge why his client, given the break of probation in September for cocaine possession, got himself arrested in November with more cocaine. His client, Alan McNeil, could get four years. “I feel like the pallbearer at a funeral,” Mr. Rubin says.

May 26, 1992 | By Scott Shane, Staff Writer