Courtroom Cowboy

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THE LAWYERS IN THE HOTEL BALLROOM WERE YAWNING AND NODDING OFF AS THE seminar speaker, S. Gerald Litvin, droned on with his lecture about how to construct a closing argument. When Litvin was finally through, moderator got up to say a few words about the next speaker, who had pointedly asked for no introduction.

“He doesn’t need an introduction,” said Raynes, who proceeded to give him one anyway.

“When I was a second year law student at Temple Law School, and clerking at Richter,Lord & Levy, we all knew he was gonna be great then,”Raynes said. “And he became greater than we all thought he was gonna be.”

“Here’s a man who has a national reputation and still comes out to lecture to lawyers in Philadelphia, where he started,” Raynes said of the man who had also been identified in the local press as having won more million dollar verdicts than any other trial lawyer in the country.

“He has been recognized by his peers,” Raynes said before ticking off a list of accolades: “Who’s Who in American Law, Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who, Men of Achievement.”

“The only thing you haven’t made, Jim,” cracked Raynes, who was Jewish, “is Who’s Who in Yeshiva.”

When Jim Beasley came to the podium,however,he wasn’t smiling at Raynes’ joke, he was frowning,looking down at the ground,and carrying a white rotary telephone.

The seminar, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association, was billed as “Masters in Trial Advocacy.” Beasley’s scheduled topic was the same as

Litvin’s, the closing argument.

It was June 1984. Beasley, who had a silver moustache, was just a few days shy of his 58th birthday. He was dressed in a blue three piece suit, white shirt and striped tie; a silver pocket watch dangled on his vest. He put his phone down on a nearby table and stood in front of his fellow trial lawyers. His hands were plunged in his pockets; his face looked grim.

“It’s June 2, 1980,” Beasley began. “It had been a warm, sunny day. It’s 8:30 in the evening. You’re in the living room in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Guanere. Joe Guanere and his wife are sitting out on the front stoop. The phone rings. We hear Joe say to Mrs.Guanere, ‘I’ll get it dear.’”

“We see Joe come in and he picks up the phone,” Beasley said, grabbing the phone he brought to the podium. “‘Yes,my name’s Joe Guanere,’”Beasley said.

For the benefit of his audience, Beasley also provided the stern voice of the caller on the other end of the line:

“Are you the father of Joseph N. Guanere?”

“Yes, yes I am. Who’s calling?”

“Is your son at home?”

“No — no, he’s not, but tell me who’s calling,” Beasley said, as he imitated the father’s nervous tone.

“This is the Lower Makefield Township Police. I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Guanere, your son is dead. Your son was killed this evening about an hour ago in an airplane crash.”

“Joe puts down the phone, unbelieving,” Beasley said, lowering his phone. “His legs are rubbery; his heart is beating fast. And he denies it. ‘There must be a mistake. Not my son. Not my oldest son.’

“And we step back and we watch him slowly walk to the front stoop and bring Mrs. Guanere in,”Beasley said, staring at the audience.“It is the beginning, it is the end —”

It was also vintage Jim Beasley. Instead of giving a lecture on how to make a closing argument, Beasley decided to just give a closing argument instead. And not just any closing, but a recreation of the one regarded by colleagues as the greatest of his career.

Just two weeks before his scheduled lecture to the trial lawyers, Beasley had tried the case of Guanere et al v. Cessna over at the federal courthouse in Camden, N.J.

Beasley was the lawyer for the lead plaintiff in the case, and after he gave his closing, the jury hammered the airplane manufacturer with a record verdict. And so Beasley decided to reprise that closing for the benefit of the lawyers on the other side of the river. And although the court files in the Cessna case have long since been destroyed, Beasley’s reenactment remains on videotape. It’s been an inspiration to many trial lawyers.

“BEFORE WE GO FURTHER, WE MUST GO BACK,” BEASLEY SAID. “BACK TO 1966. AND WE have to go 2,000 miles away to Wichita, Kansas. And we’re standing out on the ramp of Cessna’s production line and we see a hangar door open,”he said, sweeping his hand across the horizon toward an imaginary factory. “And we see an airplane, a brand new airplane, 3847 Lima, roll off the production line and out into the sun of a Kansas afternoon.”

Beasley stared straight ahead at his audience, fidgeting with one hand. His presence was commanding, his voice slow and deliberate.

“It certainly is a pretty airplane,” Beasley said, as if reciting a poem. “And it smells fresh,and it smells new, ”he said, pausing for effect.“And it smells of death.”

While the new Cessna sat on the ramp in Kansas, Beasley said, 4yearold Joe Guanere played on the street in South Philadelphia. Beasley asked the audience to recall where they were back in 1966. And then he talked about how the plane on the ramp would control “the destiny of the Guanere family,”and also bring members of the jury, as well as Beasley himself, to “this very moment in time.”

“And here we are,” Beasley said. “There is another telephone call that will be made,” he said, referring to the white phone that he had carried to the podium.

“Before we get to that, let’s go to June 2, 1980, and the Cape May County Airport,” Beasley said. “And let me shepherd you through what happened that day.”

Beasley described a Cessna tied down on the ramp.“Look over there,”he said, as he pointed off in the distance as if he could see Keith Harper driving into the airport. Harper, the 55yearold superintendent of schools in Wildwood, N.J., was the pilot of the Cessna that day. He was taking his 20 year old son, Brian, out for a ride, along with Brian’s two 18 year old friends, Joe Guanere and Thomas Cannuli.

Beasley described “some young happy men” spilling out of the car, and how proud Harper was that his son was going to fly with him that day. Harper was a conscientious pilot who “very carefully and methodically” went through a check list to make sure the plane was fit to fly, Beasley said. “What about you, Joe?” Beasley said, channeling the pilot.“You all buckled in back there?” Beasley wanted the jury to know that before he took off, Harper had checked everybody’s seat belt and made sure the door was locked.

Beasley also wanted his listeners to feel the story as he told it. “You better get back a little because he’s gonna turn,” he said about the pilot of the Cessna. “And we don’t want a lot of dust and dirt blown over us.” Beasley described the plane taxiing down the runway and gently lifting into the air.

Imagine, Beasley told the audience, that they had hopped into an airplane “real quick” and were flying formation on Harper’s plane, watching from above as the Cessna flew “over the marshes and towards Wildwood Beach.”

“You can almost see the young men laughing and joking and waving and pointing to the things that they’re seeing below,” Beasley said. The plane hugged the shoreline before it banked inward toward land.

“Look very carefully down there,” Beasley said, his voice rising, and one forefinger pointing toward the ground. “Do you see it there on top of that house? There’s a little shed and there’s somebody waving, waving a white towel,” he said, pantomiming the wave. “You can almost hear Mr.Harper say, ‘Brian,there’s your mother. See Mom down there?’”

Beasley described how the pilot gently wagged the plane’s wings at Mrs. Harper, and then he banked towards the airport. A pleasant joy ride on a sunny day was coming to an end, and for the men in the plane, Beasley warned, “Time is slowly running out.”

At the Cape May Airport, Keith Harper said over the radio that he was coming straigh tin. “Let’s follow him,”Beasley said. The camera videotaping Beasley’s lecture panned the audience, showing wannabe trial lawyers leaning forward in their seats, chins on hands; some looked enthralled; others scribbled furiously in their notebooks.

Beasley described how the plane began a gentle descent as the pilot put on 10 degrees of flaps, reducing the power, and slowing the plane in preparation for landing.

“His descent is perfect,” Beasley said. “He’s about a hundred feet from touching down on the runway… .You can see him put the throttle forward, and then the airplane takes a precipitous nose up.”

Beasley rocked back on his heels; his hands were spread apart. His voice rose in volume as he described what was going on inside the cabin.“Without any warning, the seat that Mr. Harper was sitting in came violently back with such force that it broke Mr. Cannuli’s left leg, ”Beasleys aid. And the pilot lost control of the plane.

“The nose goes up and the airplane goes to the right,” Beasley said. As for the cockpit, “We can hear the people in there screaming.” The plane crashed in a wooded section off the runway. Over in the control tower, the controller called the police.Moments later,Beasley said,“we can hear the wail of a siren approaching the airport.”

In the dense woods, a police officer needed the help of a helicopter pilot to spot the plane wreckage. Beasley described the sights and sounds in the aftermath of the crash: the helicopter hanging overhead in the sky; the “flipping of those blades in the air”; the copter pilot leaning out and pointing down at the wreckage.

Beasley described a panting police officer running through the woods, carrying a first aid kit, as branches tore at his clothes and face. The officer reached the felled plane. “It’s mangled and it’s upside down,” Beasley said. “We can smell gasoline. My God, what’s going to happen?”

The police officer knelt beside the pilot, Keith Harper, lying beside a strut, and it was obvious that Harper was dead. So was Harper’s son, Brian. The police officer administered CPR to a moaning Joe Guanere. The officer worked on Joe for several moments until his pulse was steady. The officer then turned his attention to Thomas Cannuli, whose face was “so distorted by the injuries,” Beasley said, that it was impossible to perform CPR.

Joe Guanere moaned again, and his pulse faded. The police officer tried to bring him back, but it was too late. Eighteen year old “Joe Guanere died at that instant” in the officer’s arms, Beasley told his listeners. The officer helped Cannuli, the only survivor, out of the plane, which Beasley described as a “distorted wreckage of metal and humans.” Rescue workers showed up to remove the bodies.

And the police officer who had tried to save Joe Guanere’s life picked up the phone to call Mr. and Mrs. Guanere and give them the bad news.

“I WAS SERVING SUBPOENAS,” ARTHUR RAYNES SAID OF HIS DAYS AS A LAW CLERK AT Richter,Lord & Levy, “and Jim Beasley took me under his wing.

“It was unusual because Jim was like the angry young man of his office,”Raynes said. “He didn’t talk to everybody. He had his own mission that he wanted to go do. He had a little chip on his shoulder. But for some reason, he took to me.”

As a young law clerk, Raynes was so shy and intimidated that “I was afraid to speak.” But he was also eager to learn how to become a trial lawyer, so he latched onto Jim Beasley as a mentor. Even after Beasley left the Richter firm, Raynes would pay a visit to Beasley’s home whenever he was preparing for a tough case.

“I wanted him to go over it with me,”Raynes said. Beasley would review the files and then, “He started ripping me a new one,” Raynes said. “You know, ‘Why didn’t you do this. Why didn’t you do that?’ That’s the way he taught the things that had to be done.”

Beasley also gave the young lawyer some personal advice. Raynes was the son of Russian immigrants whose given name was Arthur Rodensky, but Beasley thought it sounded too ethnic.“Why don’tyou change your name?,”Beasley suggested. “You sound like my grandmother,” Raynes said, but he took Beasley’s advice. And so Arthur G. Raynes joined the ranks of Philadelphia lawyers.

In those days, the personal injury lawyers from the Philadelphia bar were “pretty rough and tumble guys,” Raynes said. “Lots of Irish, Jews, Italians.” And they didn’t think much of the idea of sharing information with competitors.

Raynes recalled one oldtimer’s reaction to the idea of holding legal seminars.

“You’re gonna give lectures to lawyers who refer us cases, ’cause they don’t know how to handle them, and you’re gonna teach them how to handle cases? What, are you crazy?”

But the idea slowly caught on. Local lawyers gathered at a restaurant in the same building on South Broad Street where Richter, Lord & Levy was located. “They would meet in the basement and talk about cases and the law,” Raynes said. “It was the beginning of continuing education.

“They started giving lectures,” Raynes said of the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association, founded in 1959. The Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Association was founded a decade later, in 1968.

“The philosophy was, a pigeon on the shoulders of a giant sees farther than a giant,”Raynes said. “Everybody should train everybody else.”

Few trial lawyers were as generous with their knowledge as Jim Beasley. His only drawback asa speaker,Raynes said,was a lackof humor.“He didn’t have the timing. I told him, ‘Jim, stick to trying cases. You can’t tell jokes.’”

JIM BEASLEY TOLD HIS FELLOW LAWYERS THAT CESSNA HAD MANUFACTURED MORE THAN 175,000 airplanes with the same defective pilot’s seat that killed Keith Harper, his son, Brian, and Joe Guanere. An extensive paper trail documented the fatal defect, Beasley said, but Cessna chose to ignore it.

“I will not trespass on your time,”Beasley said, to detail the 10 National Transportation Safety Board reports about pilots killed as a result of similar accidents, where seats came off track, causing the pilots to lose control of their planes.

“Nor will I trespass on your time,” Beasley said, to go over all of the “airworthiness alerts” that repeatedly called to Cessna’s attention “the inherent danger” of the defective pilot seats.

Beasley said it was his burden of proof to establish “a fair preponderance of the evidence” for compensatory damages. “What is a fair preponderance of the evidence?” Beasley took his audience back to the days when there used to be general stores on every street corner in Philadelphia.

Customers would walk into the store and ask for “five pounds of beans or sugar,” Beasley said. The grocer would place a fivepound weight on one side of the scale, Beasley said. And then he pantomimed a low scooping motion, as he described how the grocer would fill a sack on the other side of the scale with beans or sugar. Beasley held up two level hands to show how the grocer kept scooping until the two scales were balanced.

If the grocer dipped his fingers into the bin and added an “imperceptible few grains” to the sack on the scale, Beasley said, wiggling his fingers for emphasis, it would cause the preponderance of weight to shift to that side of the scale. Beasley went through the evidence in his case, and said the testimony he presented to the jury showed that he had added “more than just a pinch of sugar.”

Beasley described how he brought a more durable pilot’s seat into the courtroom, one available to Cessna for 14 years, and he demonstrated “the absolute safety of the seat.” He also brought into the courthouse the mangled wreck of the Cessna that Joe Guanere died in, so that jurors could inspect it

“Come, members of the jury,” Beasley said, his voice booming, his hands beckoning. “I want you to come out of the jury box. Because I have this airplane here and I’m gonna point out things and I don’t want anybody standing up looking over somebody else’s shoulder. I want you to see it firsthand… Now you see why this airplane crashed on this day.”

Beasley reminded the audience that at trial Cessna did not refute the testimony of any of his expert witnesses. He also spoke about how Cessna did not produce any of its own engineers to testify, but instead had relied on “hired guns,” two outside experts from Florida “who neither investigated any of these accidents . . . and who only recently took the time to view this wreckage.

“Indeed,”Beasley said, his voice rising in indignation, the jury “spent more time looking at this wreckage” than Cessna’s “$80 an hour experts.”

When it came time to assess punitive damages, Beasley talked about the “clear and convincing evidence that this company requires immediate and severe punishment now for conduct that has existed for 16 years . . . conduct that has brought these young men to an early grave.”

His eyes were blazing, and he repeatedly jabbed one finger toward the ground, pistol style, for emphasis.

It was time to talk money. Beasley said if he was worth $10, and the jury brought back a punitive verdict of $1, “that would hurt a lot.” But if he had $100,000 and the punitive verdict was only $1,“I’d laugh at you,”he said. It would be cheaper to pay the punitive verdict than fix the problem.

Beasley mentioned Cessna’s net worth — $327 million — and said there were “327 million reasons why they should be punished.” And then he instructed the jury on exactly how to punish the defendant: “You’re going to do it by bringing in a substantial — and when I say substantial, I mean a substantial award of punitive damages,” he commanded.

“It should be so substantial,” he said, jabbing one hand in the air, “that when your verdict is announced, as it will be tomorrow, this lawyer sitting over there representing Cessna,” he said, gesturing behind him toward Raynes, “is going to make that other telephone call that I told you about.

“He’s going to walk out to the telephone in the corridor, and he’s going to pick it up,” Beasley said, grabbing his prop phone and walking across the stage. “And he’s going to say, ‘Operator,get me Mr.Cessna in Wichita,Kansas.”

People in the audience chuckled, but Beasley didn’t even crack a smile.

“Mr. Cessna, the folks from South Jersey have arrived at their verdict,” Beasley said, as he paced the ballroom floor. Suddenly he stopped, and brandished the phone at the audience, waving it for emphasis.

“Now you talk to Mr. Cessna,” he yelled at the trial lawyers. “You give him a message that makes his knees rubbery, that causes his heart to beat fast.”

Beasley hung up the phone. “And you do it in a clear,precise way sothat when your verdict is recorded, and you walk out into the street and you look up into the clear skies of New Jersey, ”Beasley said, pointing upward,“and you see an airplane go over, you can say I may have saved your life.”

Beasley reminded the jury about the fate of 18yearold Joe Guanere. “This young boy cries out from eternal darkness for justice,” he said. “Thank you.”

The audience erupted in applause. Beasley turned his back to the crowd and fiddled with the microphone around his neck. “I can’t get this thing off,” he said. A smiling Raynes, shaking his head in admiration, removed Beasley’s mike.

“That’s it,” Raynes said from the podium. “I’m sure you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thank you.”

ON JUNE 8, 1984, IN CAMDEN, N.J., THE FEDERAL JURY IN THE CESSNA CASE RETURNED a $29million verdict against the airplane manufacturer, $25 million of which was punitive damages. At the time, it was the highest ever verdict against an aviation company. The case subsequently settled for $13 million.

JAMES F. MUNDY USED TO HAVE HIS OWN VIDEOTAPE OF THE BEASLEY CLOSING IN THE Cessna case before he lent it to somebody who never gave it back. Mundy still drives around in his car listening to Beasley’s audiotaped lectures. “This was my idol,”Mundy explained. “Everything I am,I am because of Beasley.”

Mundy, a partner at Raynes McCarty, was a former president of the Pennsylvania State Bar Association, a former president of both the Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Trial Lawyers Associations, and a past winner of the Justice Michael A. Musmanno Memorial Award from the Philadelphia Trial Lawyers Association. But in 1970, Mundy was just a 26yearold law clerk at the Richter firm when he first saw Jim Beasley in a courtroom. It was a lasting impression.

Beasley was picking a jury for a case that involved the family of a brain damaged infant that was suing a team of doctors.“In those days at Ninth Street,there was one big jury room,” Mundy said. “All the juries got picked out of the same room, and ahead of us were Frank Shields [the top defense lawyer of the day] and Jim Beasley.

“And from the voir dire alone, I knew this case could not possibly be won by the plaintiff,” Mundy said. “There was not a prayer.”

Back at the office, the young law clerk excitedly told his boss, B. Nathaniel “Nate” Richter, about his day in court, and the long odds Beasley faced. Richter told Mundy to go back to the courthouse and watch the rest of the trial. “You’ll be of more value to me if you go down and watch that case than anything you’re doing around here,” Richter told Mundy.

“For 10 days, I was paid to watch Jim Beasley,” Mundy recalled. “I remember seeing things that amazed me.”

The mother of the brain damaged baby was about eight months pregnant when she was brought into the infectious disease ward of Albert Einstein Hospital with infectious colitis, Mundy said. The mother began a spontaneous delivery. A nurse crossed the mother’s legs in a crude attempt to prevent the birth, until the mother could be wheeled to the obstetrics ward. The result: a brain damaged infant.

“It was a very different world in those days,” Mundy said. Beasley didn’t have a claim against the hospital, because hospitals at the time were considered charitable institutions, immune from liability. So Beasley sued the woman’s regular doctors, who had been called while she was in the hospital, and didn’t bother to go see her.

Beasley didn’t have much of a case, Mundy said, but he was incredibly well prepared and quick on his feet. After a court recess, Beasley put one of the defense’s expert witnesses on the stand and asked him,“Isn’t it true when you were out in the hall, you went up to Mr. Shields during this recess and said, ‘I’ve got some more goodies for you.’ Is that true?”

The doctor began to hem and haw,saying he didn’t recall using those exact words. Beasley, Mundy said, seized the moment:“Doctor, could you tell this court what are goodies in a case involving a 6year old brain damaged boy? What’s a goodie?”

Mundy scanned the jury’s faces and saw looks of anger and disgust.

Beasley had a bookshelf in the courtroom covered by a big red blanket. He stood in front of it and challenged a defense expert to cite the medical textbooks that backed his testimony. The witness named five or six books. Beasley whipped off the red blanket, and all the books that the doctor had named, and many he hadn’t, were right there on the bookshelf. “Now, you said Agnes on Obstetrics?” Beasley said, yanking out the text. Every volume on the shelf was bookmarked.

“Now, open to the bookmark, doctor, and read it out loud to the jury,” Beasley said. The book, Mundy recalled, said “the opposite of what the doctor said.”

Thirtyfive years after the trial, Mundy could still see Beasley in that courtroom. “I still remember the suits that had a split on the side and the square shoulders,”Mundysaid. “He was inabsolute command of that courtroom….He was very handsome,”Mundy said. And fit.“He was looking like he could go 15 rounds if he had to.”

When the defense witnesses gave testimony damaging to Beasley’s case, Mundy looked over at Beasley,sitting by himself at the plaintiff’s table.

“He had a box of pencils” spilled out on the table, Mundy recalled. “He licked the erasers and he stood up the erasers one at a time until they [the pencils] all stood up and when he got to about 10, they would collapse and he would make no noise and grab them,” Mundy said. “He’d put them down and start the process again. And the jury is looking at him and the pencils, and they’re not even looking at this expert.”

The jury of six men and six women told the judge several times that they were deadlocked, but the judge kept sending them back to deliberate. “In those days, everybody wore shirts and ties on juries, not like today,” Mundy said. The jury came back to the courtroom to talk to the judge one last time. And the jury foreman had a huge brown stain covering the front and back of his shirt.

“The jury was deadlocked six six,” Mundy said. “The six women were for the plaintiff, the six men were for the defendants. And one of the women had gotten so angry,” Mundy said, that she grabbed a pot of coffee — fortunately, it was cold— “and poured it over this jury foreman.

“And the jury foreman said, ‘Your Honor, we are deadlocked,’ and they were dismissed,” Mundy said. In spite of the deadlocked jury, “Beasley told me years later when I talked to him that the case settled for a million dollars, and I believe him,” Mundy said.

Mundy had no idea before the trial what he was going to do with his life. But after he saw Jim Beasley in a courtroom, Mundy decided he had to become a trial lawyer. He also found a mentor.

“I will tell you from that day on, whenever Jim Beasley’s name would appear in a seminar, I was there,” Mundy said. “I didn’t care what the seminar was about,” Mundy said. “If his name was there,I went.”

Mundy showed up at so many events, he eventually became friends with Beasley. And that led to a plane ride.

About a year after Beasley’s speech to the trial lawyers, Beasley, a veteran pilot, offered to fly Mundy and another lawyer back to Philadelphia from a conference they had all attended in Pittsburgh. On the ride over to the airport where Beasley kept his private plane, Mundy told the other lawyer about Beasley’s recreation of

his closing in the Cessna case, and how great it was. The three lawyers arrived at the airport, and Mundy saw Beasley’s plane. “Jim, that’s funny, you’re in a Cessna,”Mundy said.“Isn’t that the same kind that

was in the —” Beasley cut him off. “Exactly the same kind,” he said. Mundy looked at Beasley. “So you modified it so the seat doesn’t come back?” “Nope,” Beasley said. “You son of a bitch,” Mundy said. Mundy climbed into the back seat of the plane, directly behind the pilot, and

jammed both his knees into Beasley’s back. “Get used to the knees,pal, ”Mundy told Beasley, “’cause they’re not moving.”

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