The Defenders : Beyond the glitz of celebrity trials, criminal law is a gut-wrenching business that the public disdains. And now, economics are making it a dead-end career for all but defenders of the rich.

They can trace their lives through a succession of grisly subtitles: the Hillside Strangler, the 54th Street Massacre, the Ninja Murders, the Halloween Ambush, the Chinatown Shoot-out. . . . They can recall, in anguished detail, each case they’ve lost, each time a client has been sentenced to life imprisonment or, God forbid, death.

They are criminal defense attorneys--not the celebrity lawyers who squeeze past ogling camera lenses on the way to represent the likes of O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, but the everyday lawyers who champion the causes of anonymous men and women accused of heinous crimes.

They’ve never been asked for an autograph, never posed for People magazine. They dine, not at hoity-toity places, but with the hoi polloi in a corner of a dingy courtroom cafeteria.

“Despite the Robert Shapiros of the world, people like me are not getting rich,” said Tustin defense lawyer Donald G. Rubright. “I don’t have a Mercedes; I have a Maxima with 122,000 miles on it.”

And even as their profession takes center stage this week in Simpson’s trial on double-murder charges, they worry that the kind of high-stakes criminal law they practice is becoming a dead-end career for all except the few whose clients are the very, very rich.

The lawyers are not alone in their fears. The same sense of impending extinction is permeating the ranks of specialists and sole practitioners throughout the professions--from medicine to accounting to architecture--as economic and social realities corrode layers of tradition and privilege.

Private attorneys will always pick up drunk driving and misdemeanor cases. But for specialists in major felonies, “there’s no future,” laments Rickard Santwier, a criminal defense attorney for 25 years. “The only lawyers who will be private practitioners will be those who are hired by people with money.”

Court appointments to represent clients who couldn’t afford their own defense used to keep the private defense lawyers busy. But this year, Los Angeles County opened a second public defender office--as many municipalities have done--and cut by more than half the number of cases spun off to outside lawyers.

In Orange County, where the idea of a second public defender’s office has been around for a while, court administrators are clamping down on fees paid for expert witnesses and investigators that private defense lawyers say they need. A Superior Court judge was assigned earlier this year to hear complaints from lawyers who feel they were wrongly denied funds by court bureaucrats--who keep their eyes on the purse strings, not defense needs.

“A lot of judges like to say that an indigent defendant is not entitled to a Cadillac defense,” Rubright said. “But as one judge said: ‘It’d better be a Chevy that starts when you turn the key.’ ”

Just as significantly, the cost of a felony criminal case, especially a murder trial, has soared past middle-class affordability, further concentrating work in the hands of public defenders.

“For private lawyers like myself doing murder cases, there are fewer and fewer cases,” said defense attorney Michael Yamaki. “People just can’t afford the kind of defense they need in such a case. . . . Everybody deserves the same kind of defense that O.J. is getting, but how many people are going to get it? That’s the question.”

With fewer cases coming their way--and the realization that the economics will only get worse--many of the region’s best criminal defense attorneys, including those who have specialized in death-penalty cases, are putting their skills to work on white-collar crime cases, family law, environmental issues and even an occasional drunk-driving charge. Others are looking at retirement, calculating how much longer they can go on if they don’t want to branch out.

Tough choices, these are, for a breed of attorney that seems locked in the embrace of a grinding, gut-wrenching, all-consuming job. For the unlucky, murder trials and death-penalty cases can lay waste to physical health, deplete emotional reserves, sunder marriages and friendships and make a mockery of the most earnest of personal commitments. They’re all unlucky sometimes.

Carl Jones knows who and how, and rattles off a list of wrecks as easily as if he were reciting his own resume. This one is in a wheelchair, another is using a cane after a stroke, a third suddenly dropped dead. Jones knows from his inside out the toll a death-penalty trial can take on an attorney. He’s been doing them for nearly three decades now, and colleagues say he’s one of the best.

“I’ve frequently said I can’t find any death-penalty trial lawyers over 65 years old who are in good health. . . . Check around. You’ll find people with vision problems, heart problems, strokes, diabetes, high blood pressure,” Jones said.

“It seems we bury somebody every month or so. It’s a killing profession. In trying to save lives, we’re all killing ourselves.”

And for whom? Accused murderers, rapists, hate-crime perpetrators--individuals whose names are more obscure than the where, when and how of the crime. Defendants feared and reviled by a public that is baffled, even appalled, when lawyers willingly take their cases. A public that’s quick to cry “technicalities” if the defense is successful.

“It’s not easy being a defense attorney,” Rubright said. “You’re not beloved by the public, by prosecutors or police, and often not by your own client.”

For this, courts typically pay attorneys $50 an hour--$75 an hour in a capital case--while colleagues in large law firms bill their corporate clients four or five times as much, senior partners charge $600 an hour and the biggest-name lawyers get $1,000 or even $2,500 an hour.

“The county pays $300 or $400 an hour to a civil lawyer to handle a landslide or fight voter reapportionment. Then they pay us $75 an hour for a death-penalty case,” Jones said. “We’re only handling life and liberty.”

Under a contract with a panel of private attorneys, Los Angeles County now pays a flat rate for defending indigents in major felony cases. The rates are based on a number of factors, including the seriousness of the charge and complexity of the case, with four tiers of payment: $60,000, $90,000, $120,000 and $200,000 and higher. High-profile lawyer Leslie Abramson, who collected $650,000 from the now-depleted estate of Jose and Kitty Menendez for defending their son Erik on murder charges, will be paid $125,000 a year by the county for Erik’s retrial.

(Lawyers expect Simpson’s defense to exhaust his net worth, estimated to be $10 million.)

In Orange County, flat fees govern all non-homicide cases. Private lawyers on panels receive from $360 for a misdemeanor case to $1,160 for a felony case that is bound over for trial, plus up to $360 a day for felony trial work.

The Orange County courts have reviewed and rejected proposals for a second public defender office, though county managers continue to consider it. “We felt that our contracts (with private lawyers) were more cost-effective than a second public defender’s office,” said Alan Slater, the Superior Court’s executive officer.

From their fees, criminal defense attorneys--who most often practice alone or with a small group of partners--have to pay the office rent, utility bills and clerical salaries. And unlike public defenders, who make $42,500 to $96,800 a year in Los Angeles County, they don’t have paid benefits--vacations, health insurance, retirement plans and the like.

Still, criminal defense attorneys don’t claim to be impoverished. Most say they live comfortable lives. But not lavish.

“People at the top make an OK living,” said Charles Lindner, a defense attorney in Santa Monica and former president of the Criminal Courts Bar Assn. “But nobody who’s really good does it for the money. Carl (Jones) is not rich, Leslie is not rich. I’m not rich. Our civil counterparts are probably making $800,000 a year.

“Am I comfortable? Yes. I’m supposed to be,” Lindner said. “I’ve been a lawyer for 20 years. To have a 2,000-square-foot house on a decent lot on the Westside of town, that’s comfortable. But what are you supposed to have after 20 years of work . . . and still pulling 60 hours a week?”

Veteran Santa Ana defense lawyer Marshall M. Schulman says practitioners aren’t going to become multimillionaires, and that fact also has led to the erosion of members in the criminal defense bar.

“You don’t see the younger lawyers getting into the field,” Schulman, 67, said. “Criminal law was very popular in the 1960s and ‘70s, but in the ‘80s and continuing in the ‘90s, young lawyers have become much more mercenary. They now are more interested in material wealth.”

In the past six years, since leaving the Los Angeles public defender’s office, Mark S. Kaiserman has spent most of his time on five or six death-penalty cases.

He earned more money in private practice. But not enough. This past week, Kaiserman went to work for the new second public defender’s office.

“Yes, I was making more, substantially more,” Kaiserman said. “But that doesn’t mean I was happier. The quality of my life was not better. I was working harder during those years, with one death-penalty case after another.” Harder even than having 30 or 40 cases to juggle at any one time in the public defender’s office.

While in private practice, Kaiserman skipped work on weekends only once or twice a year. “That’s not the kind of life I wanted. Other things are important to me,” he said. The other things are his wife and two children.

“I enjoyed my life more with what I was making as a public defender than with what I was making in the years of private practice,” Kaiserman said. “I had more of a life and I felt better about myself.”

Defense attorneys who specialize in death-penalty cases know about not having a life, about having their lives consumed by the peril of another’s, about being terrified to take any time for themselves.

“This is just not you picking up a briefcase and coming to work,” said attorney Yamaki, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Commission. “Your entire life is entrenched with the case. . . . People talk about the high costs (of) legal representation, but I think most lawyers are charging an amount that takes into consideration what this is going to take out of them by the time they finish the case.

“There is a dilemma between having a personal life and really doing your best work. I don’t really know if you can balance the two,” Yamaki said. “I try to give as much commitment to my personal life as to a case, but while you’re in trial, your trial becomes more important than your personal life at that time. It sounds sick, but when given the responsibility of defending someone’s life, it . . . requires a full-time commitment. You can’t be a part-time lawyer when you’re doing a death-penalty trial.”

This awful burden of someone else’s life leaves defense attorneys with little energy for anything else. “You are it for your client,” said Santa Monica defense attorney Michael V. White. “Your client has nobody else to rely on but you. You are the last stop. If you can’t do your best for your client, if you can’t save your client, the client’s gone. That’s a pretty awesome responsibility.”

So they obsess on their cases. They choose an office because it’s near the courthouse, then make it into a cocoon. They bark at their secretaries, skip meals and, after a 16-hour workday, wake up at 2 a.m. to scribble more notes.

Every personal plan gets tossed aside, Yamaki said. “I would be hard to live with, if I went on vacation and didn’t do that last bit of interviewing and it might have helped the case,” he said. “In your mind, you think that everything you do might make or break the case, and you have so much fear that, even in questioning (witnesses), that you can blow your case, just by one wrong question.

“That’s what you make (clients) pay for,” he said. “It’s more than hours; it’s the emotional toll. You never, ever recover. I can tell you every case that I lost, what I thought happened in the case, what I would have done differently. . . . You carry it with you.”

At his Pasadena office, attorney Jones can shut out just about everything when he’s working on a life-or-death case--everything but the regrets of a loss. “You agonize, second-guess yourself, beat yourself up bad,” he said. “You wonder, dammit, why did I go to that movie, take that afternoon off, go to lunch? Would it have been different if I had worked that weekend? It’s horrible. It’s horrible.”

In his 25 years of practice, Santwier never has had a client sentenced to death. But whenever he takes on another capital case, he has to steel himself for that possibility.

With each case, Santwier said, “I see a substantial change in me. Each time you try one of these cases, you give up a little bit of your person, your humanity. You try not to make the highs too high or the lows too low, else, how can you go on to the next case?”

Going on to the next case is becoming harder and harder for private defense lawyers. Santwier, who co-chairs the county panel of attorneys who take on indigent clients, said about 50% of his caseload now comes from court appointments. By next year, he figures, about 20% of his cases will be court-appointed; in two years, that will drop down to 5%.

“One of the sad things about the law I’m practicing now is that I won’t be practicing it in the future,” Santwier said.

Jones, who is 56, doesn’t want to practice any other kind of law. “I’m watching the calendar until I can get the hell out of here,” he said. “I’m going to retire. I’m going to finish the three cases I’ve got, and then I’m not taking any more.

“With people dropping dead and committing suicide, having heart attacks and strokes, I think it’s the wise alternative,” Jones said. “I want to retire. I want to live.”

Fifty-two-year-old H. Elizabeth Harris wants to go on practicing forever, she says. But she wants to stay off Jones’ list of wretched lives.

She was headed there a few years ago, her blood pressure a barometer of her growing caseload. So she made some changes. She’s a vegetarian now and fits a four-mile walk into each 12-hour workday.

Last year, she took two months off and went to Africa. She knows now that “I have to take care of all parts of me,” Harris said. After her current capital cases are finished, she is not likely to take on any more.

Yet it’s hard for criminal defense attorneys to watch their practices metamorphose into civil law. The love of the fight--the belief that they’re making a difference--burrows into their souls and stays there.

“There have been times,” said White, “when I have represented somebody who’s never ever had anybody in their corner before. They see me fight with everything I’ve got and they know I care. Win or lose, they’ve at least found somebody who has been there for them.”

Despite everything, added Jones, “there is one saving grace to all of this: when the court clerk reads the verdict ‘not guilty,’ or, in a hopeless case, when the clerk instead of reading a verdict of death reads a verdict of life imprisonment. That’s why we do it.”