Jeffery Robinson makes name protecting rights of high-profile suspects
When a public defender was kicked off a triple-murder case last August and accused of having sex with a suspect, the judge appointed Robinson to the new defense team.
And when the Northwest Defenders Association, a nonprofit public defense firm, teetered on bankruptcy last fall after years of alleged mismanagement, another judge asked Robinson to help clean up that mess, too.
His recent high profile confirms what legal observers have known for years: Robinson, 46, a criminal defense lawyer at Schroeter, Goldmark and Bender, is one of the best problem solvers in Seattle.
"If the police knocked on my door and put the cuffs on, the first call I would make would be to Jeffery Robinson," says Mark Bartlett, first assistant U.S. Attorney of Western Washington, who has prosecuted two cases with Robinson on defense.
With his deep Southern roots and Harvard Law School education, Robinson is revered by his workaholic peers as a master communicator and a true blood-and-guts trial lawyer.
Yet there are signs of something much less sensational. One of the prominent images in his office is a framed poster of the 1970s cartoon hero "Underdog," a gift from a close friend. In his Capitol Hill home, he keeps the price tags near his exercise equipment for extra motivation.
"I'm glad people think I'm a good lawyer — I think I'm a good lawyer," Robinson says. "But I'm from a family with five kids. Any tendency to get overly impressed with yourself is easily beaten down by your siblings, who remind you how you picked your nose."
Born and raised in Memphis, Tenn., Robinson was 11 years old in April 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. marched through the city to help settle a garbage workers' strike. Several people were arrested during a skirmish with the National Guard, including black professionals Robinson knew and had been raised to admire.
"I was awed by the lawyers who swooped in and represented these people," he says. "I was thinking what a great job they did, how much authority and influence they had."
He had his calling.
Urged on by his parents' high expectations — his father was a high-school principal, his mother a teacher — Robinson attended Marquette University in Milwaukee, then Harvard. He came to Seattle as a legal intern in 1980, the year Mount St. Helens exploded.
The sunsets were beautiful. He loved the work. The Defender Association, a public-defense firm in King County, offered him a job. He graduated the next year and moved west.
Knowing the witnesses
In 1985, Tom Hillier, the federal public defender who now represents terrorist Ahmed Ressam, hired Robinson to work for the Federal Public Defender's Office in Seattle. Hillier says that even back then, watching Robinson during a trial was like watching somebody "telling a story to the family around Thanksgiving dinner."
Earlier this year, when dealing with a hostile witness — a tough, evasive police sergeant — in King County Superior Court, Robinson obtained surprisingly crucial information with a polite, hypnotic riff of questions. He apologized often and always remembered to make the cop laugh.
"He's always saying 'sir,' he's always polite and soft, even when he's sticking the knife in slowly," says Song Richardson, who also works at Schroeter, Goldmark and Bender, and often co-counsels with Robinson. "It's effective in front of the jury."
Robinson says his style would never matter without the substance. For example, one of his goals in dealing with a difficult witness is to know the witness' information better than the witness, and to make sure the witness knows that.
His work ethic seems driven by an unending supply of old-school axioms, with which he concludes many of his points:
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
"If you're satisfied and standing still, people are passing you by."
"Late at night, I tell myself, my opponent is asleep and I'm not, and it'll show tomorrow."
Robinson has just finished a term as president of the Washington State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He is a board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He is on the faculty at the National Criminal Defense College in Macon, Ga., where he goes once a year to teach. In June, the King County Bar Association named him lawyer of the year for 2003.
A career of victories
In 1988, Robinson left public-defense work to represent Kari Tupper, one of the women allegedly drugged and sexually abused by U.S. Sen. Brock Adams. The senator chose not to run for re-election.
In 1990, in one of his few civil cases, Robinson delivered the opening statement in the wrongful-death trials of two murdered Seattle cannery workers, Gene Viernes and Silme Domingo. The federal jury awarded their families a $15 million settlement and found the late Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his widow, Imelda, responsible.
In 1992, Robinson and another attorney, Michael Iaria, freed Tyrone Briggs, a stuttering man accused of attacking or sexually assaulting five women near Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
In 1999, a judge dropped murder charges against another Robinson client, Dr. Eugene Turner, a Port Angeles physician accused of suffocating a 3-day-old baby.
"He is a true trial lawyer," says Hillier, the public defender. "He is not a snob. He is not a white-collar litigator. He doesn't specialize in fat cats with big bucks. He gets down and dirty, and he is willing to take the blood-and-guts case. He is a trial lawyer who will take the hard case involving a heinous crime."
Robinson is preparing for the fall trial of Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns, who are charged in the 1994 baseball-bat murders of Rafay's parents and sister. The slayings are among Bellevue's bloodiest.
Rafay and Burns were caught in Canada in 1995, but have spent eight years in prison without a trial because of an international extradition controversy.
The Canadian government wouldn't extradite them to King County unless prosecutors promised not to seek the death penalty. Capital punishment is considered cruel and unusual in Canada, and Rafay and Burns are Canadian citizens. After six years of legal battles, the U.S. relented.
The trial was delayed again last year when Burns was caught having sex with his defense attorney in jail. She and her co-counsel were dismissed and replaced by Robinson, Richardson and another lawyer at their firm, Amanda Lee.
Robinson predicts the trial will be "an absolute war."
Robinson says being a criminal defense lawyer is part of his identity. He enjoys the creativity and the camaraderie (in fact, he rarely tries cases alone, always preferring to work with other lawyers), as well as the work of advocating for individual liberties and civil rights.
"Over 100 people have been freed from death row, not on technicalities, but (because) they did not commit the crime," Robinson says. "When the most horrible accusations are made, that's when the Constitution is really tested."
He also has the unique position of auditor of the Seattle Police Department's intelligence unit.
Bartlett, the prosecutor, says Robinson is "an incredible believer in the system. He just believes that government and police are incredibly powerful, and the most important thing is that we play by the rules. And he wants to make sure that government is always held to task.
"If he provides a vigorous defense, and a guilty person gets off, then shame on the government for not getting the admissible evidence before a jury. He doesn't go home feeling bad about that."
Taking on 'racial disparities'
Robinson seems inspired as well by what he calls "racial disparities in the criminal justice system."
"Being a person of color as the lawyer in the courtroom can make a difference," says Robinson, who with his older brother integrated Memphis' Catholic school system. "If the jury looks at me, with a coat and tie, and it sounds like I know what I'm doing, when they consider that question, 'What are black folk like?' they have to include me in that group."
Robinson has been married for 15 years to Carmen Valdes, a Harvard-trained architect who designs jewelry for a living.
"I don't think I've arrived anywhere because I really want to continue to improve," Robinson says. "If I'm satisfied, that's when I apply to law school and start teaching."
Michael Ko: 206-515-5653 or mko@seattletimes.com