Quiet, Methodical, Uelmen Gets Job of Laying Mines : Attorneys: Professor is not known for flair, but his grasp of arcane legal issues gives the defense skills it needs.
Long before he was tapped to help defend O.J. Simpson, Gerald Uelmen was a law professor at Loyola University law school. Long before Kathleen Kennedy-Powell became the Municipal Court judge assigned to the preliminary hearing for Simpson, she was a law student at Loyola.
And who was her professor in criminal law and criminal procedure? None other than Gerald F. Uelmen.
Now the tables are turned: The professor is asking his former student to rule that a bloody glove and blood spatters found at Simpson’s Brentwood estate cannot be introduced as evidence because they were seized during a search that the defense contends was illegal. The judge will make her ruling today.
“Uelmen taught her everything she knows about search and seizure,” said Loyola law professor Stan Goldman, another ex-student of Uelmen.
Their connection, known to the prosecution, is not as ironic as it would seem, given that Uelmen has spent most of his legal career teaching and running law schools, not trying cases in the courtroom.
Their relationship is one of many twists in a case that has transfixed the public since the bloody bodies of Simpson’s ex-wife and her friend were discovered June 13 at her Brentwood condominium.
Now Uelmen, who stepped down last month as dean of the Santa Clara University law school, has moved onto center stage in the hearing, cross-examining witnesses in the defense’s attempt to keep out evidence found during the search of Simpson’s home.
Next to the polished Robert L. Shapiro, who is Simpson’s lead defense attorney, the white-haired, bespectacled lawyer with the hearing aid looks the part of a frumpy, avuncular professor more accustomed to perusing lawbooks than commanding the spotlight.
“His job as second chair to Shapiro is to lay the mines in the minefield and make the prosecutor walk over them,” said Gigi Gordon, a Santa Monica attorney who specializes in death penalty cases.
Unlike Shapiro, a celebrity lawyer who aggressively grilled police witnesses Wednesday, Uelmen questioned them matter-of-factly, making his points without flair or drama in a style that some detractors maintain revealed his lack of significant trial experience.
Yet he earned the nickname “the Cobra” many years ago when he worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, prosecuting organized crime and gambling. His colleagues said they called him that because he was so deft at inflicting wounds on his unsuspecting opponents.
“Those who now say he is just a paper guy underestimate his skill as a trial lawyer,” said Los Angeles defense lawyer Stephen D. Miller.
In fact, Uelmen’s strength lies largely outside the courtroom. He is known for his firm grasp of arcane legal issues and appellate decisions--just the sort of skills that the defense needs to suppress evidence seized at Simpson’s estate shortly after the murders.
Uelmen, 53, normally spends much of his time tracking the decisions of the California Supreme Court, some of whose conservative justices hate his often-critical commentary on their rulings and tend to disparage him privately as an ideologue. Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas, according to an appellate lawyer, once angrily chastised Uelmen at a party for his relentless criticism of the high court--particularly of failing to protect the rights of criminal defendants and of being too favorable to business interests.
But Uelmen, who aspires to a seat on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, is generally regarded as open-minded and flexible on criminal issues, except on the death penalty, which he strongly opposes.
Although he is quite liberal, Uelmen blasted the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1991 for “the dumbest decision of the year” after that court reversed the death sentence of a convicted murderer solely because the prosecutor had quoted the Bible in his closing argument.
“The point is that jurors are intelligent enough to give the Bible the weight it deserves, and lawyers should be free to address jurors as though they are intelligent human beings,” he wrote. “ . . . All too often, the dithering nincompoops in today’s courtrooms are the lawyers and the judges.”
San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Brown said he was surprised that Shapiro, after selecting Uelmen for the defense team, also brought on board another constitutional scholar--celebrated Harvard University law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who has represented such famous clients as Claus von Bulow and was glamorized in a recent movie.
“Uelmen is better,” Brown contended. “He probably knows California law better than any individual I know of.”
But in the Simpson case, Uelmen, like Shapiro at times, gets his share of negative reviews. A prosecutor who has gone up against the professor called him “pedestrian at best” and, in the courtroom, “pedantic.”
“Do you know how to spell boring?” the prosecutor asked.
A defense lawyer praised Uelmen, but also noted that his lack of trial experience showed when he asked a detective if the Police Department always sent four police officers to notify a crime victim’s family of a death. Instead of giving the detective the chance to provide a plausible explanation for the presence of four officers, the attorney said, he should have reserved the point for arguments before the judge.
But other lawyers praised Uelmen’s methodical cross-examination of the detective as solid if not flashy. They said he was carefully making points to show that the police entered Simpson’s estate not because they felt they had an emergency but because they already considered him a suspect.
“You don’t have to be Clarence Darrow to put in a motion to suppress,” Brown said. “ . . . What he has to do is make certain points, and that is exactly what he did.”
San Francisco attorney Ephraim Margolin noted that Uelmen also may be trying to solicit as much information as possible from the witnesses to prevent the defense from being ambushed by prosecution testimony during a future trial.
Uelmen has known Shapiro for many years. The former dean said in a previous interview that they became acquainted through Loyola, where Shapiro also studied, and through California Attorneys for Criminal Justice, a statewide association of criminal defense lawyers that Uelmen once headed.
The two lawyers worked together to defend Christian Brando, who eventually pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the slaying of his half-sister’s lover.
Uelmen, a devoted Catholic, lives in Santa Clara County with his wife, Martha, a family law attorney. They have three grown children: two daughters--one of whom is also a lawyer--who belong to a Roman Catholic lay religious order, and a son who is a musician.
Uelmen grew up in Los Angeles, attending Mt. Carmel High, a parochial school in South-Central Los Angeles.
His wife described him as a workaholic. The Simpson case has consumed him, she said, and “he is loving it.”
“There are jokes about him having been cloned,” she said, because he is so prolific in his writing and his work. Uelmen has written several books, including one about legal humor and another about drug abuse law, and many law review articles.
Uelmen graduated from Georgetown University of School of Law in 1965. He represented indigent clients in criminal cases in Washington before joining the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. Between his teaching assignments, he has represented defendants in criminal proceedings, usually on appeals and sometimes without charge.
He will be a visiting scholar and instructor at Stanford University before he returns to Santa Clara.
During his closing argument on the suppression motion Wednesday, Uelmen sounded as though he might be talking to a classroom full of law students.
“The cynics suggest that this is too high-profile a case to suppress evidence,” he said, adding that he could think of “no better vehicle” to teach the lessons of the 4th Amendment than to suppress the fruits of the search of Simpson’s estate.
