Gertner leads off with her defense of Susan Saxe, a Brandeis college graduate. In 1970 five people robbed the State Street Bank in Brighton, Massachusetts with the hope of raising money for an anti-Vietnam war fund. As Gertner writes, “the robbery turned tragic when Officer Walter Schroeder … responded to a silent alarm.” The lookout man, unaware that the other four were long gone, shot Schroeder in the back. The three male suspects were caught immediately. Saxe and Katherine Power became fugitives.
In March 1975 Saxe was apprehended in Philadelphia. Gertner, twenty-nine, a member of the bar for less than three years, and a member of a small Boston civil rights/civil liberties criminal law firm was called and asked to take “a small, supporting role” in Saxe’s defense. That role changed dramatically when Saxe’s lead attorney, Katie Roraback, decided not to represent Saxe in the second of her trials. Roraback recommended that Gertner replace her, urging the novice lawyer to take the case: “It is not often that your work and your heart come together.” Gertner was conflicted but in the end, with Moishe’s counsel, agreed.
In her early trials, Gertner was often the only woman in the courtroom, all eyes on her. Shockingly, it was not so different from a century before when Belva Lockwood, Clara Foltz, and Lavinia Goodell — three of America’s earliest women lawyers — broke social and professional convention by defending criminals in court. Yet unlike those women, Gertner did not fuss over whether to wear a hat. She was not burdened by the expectations of Victorian female behavior. Her presentations involved attacking, cajoling, and challenging judges and opposing counsel. She came near to tears during certain summations and, for a closing argument, thought nothing of placing a chair before the jury and rolling into a near-fetal ball of womanhood to help the jury better understand her abused client.
It is fair to say that as a trial attorney Gertner was fearless, and very wise as she shaped a courtroom identity, complete with red suit — skirt not pants, lest any juror find her too masculine. Drawing upon the trial advocacy wisdom of Harvard Professor Gary Bellow, she learned that she could “play the aggressive lawyer even if I wasn’t an aggressive human being.”
In Defense of Women devotes three chapters to the Saxe case. In less skillful hands, the book might have collapsed at the conclusion of this drama. But it does not. Gertner moves on and so does her narrative.
Like any lawyer, Gertner has plenty of small cases that barely make page twenty of the local newspapers. In the decade after the Saxe trial, she solidifies her trial advocate’s reputation, however, with a handful of cases important for their jurisprudence, or for Gertner’s service to innocent clients. There is Marcia Y’s malpractice suit against Dr X, her psychiatrist. She alleged wrongful sexual abuse in therapy, he countered that the sex was consensual. There is the lawsuit, “successful beyond our wildest expectations,” challenging a Massachusetts statute that would prohibit the use of any public funds for abortions, even for the victims of rape or incest. Then, there is Elizabeth Levey who entered Gertner’s life when she was charged with manslaughter. In the last trimester of pregnancy Levey got drunk, wrecked her car, the fetus died, and she was indicted for vehicular homicide.
The colorful politics of Boston and the state cross Gertner’s desk in the Ted Anzalone extortion trial. Gertner marries and has two babies. She defends Lisa Grimshaw, a battered woman. As a first, in 1989-90, she defends a young man accused of rape and experiences the new “fascism” of the women’s movement. In the same months, Gertner brings Teresa Contardo’s employment discrimination lawsuit to trial. Ambitious, hard working and very productive, Contardo’s old-boy national brokerage firm has, she alleges, denied her access to new clients and to the special perks that draw clients in.
Exhausted yet? The list of robbery and murder suspects goes on. Then Professor Clare Dalton comes to Gertner when Harvard Law School, which only began admitting women students in 1950, denies her tenure. Matthew Stuart, brother of murderer Charles Stuart, hires Gertner in 1990 believing that he had been granted immunity for implicating Charles. Through all of these cases Gertner keeps the pace tight and suspenseful, while teaching us many lessons in the law. In this season of television re-runs, devotees of Law and Order or The Good Wife would do well to turn off the tube, and sit down with Gertner’s book. They might pull an all-nighter.
©2011 Jill Norgren for SeniorWomen.com
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