Skip Granger, 1967
A recent CBS Morning Show story about wrongly convicted people reminded me of a special time in my life. One of my most inspiring experiences came in helping indigent prisoners seek justice. During law school at KU, I was selected to participate in a recently established Ford Foundation program providing post-convictional procedure to convicts who otherwise might not receive legal representation. I went regularly to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, but soon learned that that this prison did not offer enough opportunities to help. Prisoners housed there had been apprehended by the FBI, composed mainly of attorneys, and thus the cases were pretty much bulletproof.
Then I accepted an opportunity to participate in a newly founded Nussbaum Project offering similar services for state prisoners in Lansing Penitentiary. That was a different matter entirely. Fifty plus years ago, rural Kansas towns often had only two law enforcement officers who worked eight hour shifts, leaving the late hours unmanned. An unruly person could become a problem and was sometimes locked up for need and convenience, our United States Constitution notwithstanding. Such situations provided opportunities for fruitful efforts in legal services. Those of us in the program represented the prisoners in state and federal courts, delivering services such as conducting fact investigations, locating and working with expert witnesses, drafting pleadings, filing motions, preparing appellate briefs, and creating case strategies.
The professor in charge of these programs was Paul E. Wilson, an
attorney notable for pleading the landmark case, “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” before the U.S. Supreme Court. Paul (pictured at right) was my very favorite professor and I have many special memories of him. Here are three of those. (1) He had purchased his only suit to go to Washington and handle the Brown case. (2) After we won a case at Lansing Penitentiary, our victor was taken to lunch and asked Paul for a nickel to make a phone call; phone calls had gone up significantly in price while he served his time. (3) Many years later, Mary Ann and I were invited to dine with Paul and his wife Harriett who were flown to San Francisco by our KU Law School Dean. The visit allowed me an opportunity to show my thanks and appreciation to Paul. RIP
Another memory of this program, more humorous in nature – fellow law student Jerry Donnelly and I were at Lansing visiting the prisoner who made my desk plate, which stayed at the front of my desk until I retired. The prisoner asked us where we ate during our visits. We told him in ”Officers Mess.” It was convenient and, as law students in the program, we could eat there for free. He seemed shocked and said, ”The prisoners cook that food; they spit and piss in it.” We ate elsewhere in the future!
Following law school, I passed the Kansas Bar and took a position as the Research Attorney for the Kansas Supreme Court. That’s a story in itself, but suffice it to say that my one year commitment was sufficient for me to decide that I did not want to spend my life working in the legal profession. This turned out to be a good decision both financially and in my happiness quotient.
I did enjoy my experiences at the Kansas Supreme Court, and especially enjoyed Justice Harold Fatzer. (At left) We agreed on a lot of legal issues and became friends. When the court refused to agree with us on a legal issue, Harold and I worked together for weeks on the case at night. Harold’s wife was very social, so we would have drinks and dine at his country club after working late on the case. Our diligence paid off, and several weeks later, the court agreed with our carefully worded opinion. You can imagine our glee when Westlaw “keynoted” the cases under our opinion, and the case was printed in Judicial Highlights, a bound book for all legal libraries of the best decisions in the U.S. legal system.
The prisoner in this case was released from prison. I truly wish that my story could end there, but when the fellow returned to western Kansas, the local folks made his life hell – flattening his tires along with many other indignities.
My friend Harold Fatzer became Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court. Unfortunately, he was removed from an airplane when a stewardess thought that he had had too much to drink. The newspapers had a ball with that. Unhappily, my friend went home and eventually committed suicide. RIP
Let’s not end on a sad note. Harold once asked me into his office to meet ”the only man to ever be the Kansas Governor, Attorney General and Chief Justice.” Harold was quite surprised when Ed Arn, a long
time friend of our family, said ”Hi, Skip!” Much later, Ed Arn remarried and visited us in San Francisco with his new bride, who was nice, but not nearly as gracious as his first wife Katherine. We took them to a nice restaurant, where we were served by a waitress with a Cockney accent. To Ed Arn she said,”What can I get you, Guvn’r,” using a typical Cockney phrase for addressing a gentleman. The new wife said, ”How did you know that he was the Governor?” I rest my case!
Editor’s Note: The Defender Project in which Skip worked has operated since 1965. Since 2008, students in what is now called the Wilson Project have won at least 67 direct appeals, constitutional challenges and actual innocence cases. Students in the Project have helped free three wrongfully convicted Kansans since 2015. The project gets more than 200 letters a year from inmates seeking assistance.
