Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman's Harrowing Quest for Justice

13. The People’s Lawyer

13 The People’s Lawyer Hal Harlowe understood as well as anyone that while the criminal justice system could be, in a word, “ugly,” it could also be ennobling. He had seen the system at its best and worst, from both sides. Early in his career, he had prosecuted criminal cases as an assistant district attorney in Wisconsin’s Rock County and for the state Justice Department. He also had worked as a criminal defense attorney in Milwaukee and Madison . Over the years, Harlowe had seen dangerous criminals avoid punishment and good people who made mistakes involving drugs or anger get railroaded by prosecutors who seemed to have anger-management issues of their own. “What would really invigorate the system,” he often said, “would be having DAs and public defenders switch jobs every few years.” In 1973, when Harlowe was a state prosecutor, he handled a horrific case involving a young Chippewa man who allegedly beat two elderly women to death on an Indian reservation. The man had a long history of violence and told a friend he committed the crime. But the evidence against him was slim, due in part to shoddy police work. (Harlowe himself found the murder weapon, a tire iron tossed into a hamper that local authorities managed to overlook.) A self-described “hotshot,” Harlowe thought he put on a good case and was confident in a conviction; instead , the all-white jury returned a not guilty verdict. The Native Americans in the room began wailing. “It was like the unrestrained moaning you hear at a funeral,” he later recalled. “It came straight from their souls. It went back in time and bespoke ages of suffering.” That sound—of justice denied—was forever etched in his mind. 102 Nine years later, Harlowe, then with a public interest law center that advocated on behalf of juveniles and the disabled, ran for Dane County district attorney and won. During the campaign, he characterized the position as “the people’s lawyer.” After a few months in office, he was less sanguine, calling the job “the ultimate test of someone’s optimism. The inclination to appeal to people’s meaner and baser instincts can be pretty strong.” As district attorney, Harlowe reorganized the office, creating a separate unit for misdemeanor and traffic cases, which Jill Karofsky later came to head. During his tenure, the number of local prosecutions for domestic violence rose from about a dozen to six hundred a year. Like most district attorneys with large staffs, Harlowe personally prosecuted only a handful of cases. One of these was a double murder that for him evoked memories of the killings on the reservation. In 1984, an imprisoned white supremacist, Joseph Paul Franklin, confessed to murdering an interracial couple in Madison seven years earlier. Franklin had been convicted of slaying two black men in Salt Lake City who offended him by jogging with a white woman. (He was acquitted of the 1980 shooting of civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and suspected of other crimes, including the 1978 shooting that paralyzed porn publisher Larry Flynt.) Franklin, angling for a transfer from a predominantly black federal prison, said he had come to Madison to kill a local white judge who made national news by ascribing blame to a white teenage girl who was sexually assaulted by three black men. At the shopping mall, Franklin decided on the spur of the moment to “send this nigger and white bitch to hell.” Harlowe noted that despite four life sentences, two each under state and federal law, Franklin might someday get out of prison. Moreover, he felt the families of his Madison victims deserved justice. And so he had Franklin brought back to Dane County for a week-long trial. Just prior to the verdict, in the library of Harlowe’s office, there was another spontaneous eruption of emotion: family members clasped hands and prayed for justice. The jury found Franklin guilty; the judge added two more life sentences and sent him back to the same federal prison. After three terms as district attorney, Harlowe in 1989 returned to private practice, doing criminal defense and professional licensing. He remained remarkably charitable in his view of human nature, even The People’s Lawyer 103 • resisting the temptation to demonize Joseph Paul Franklin, an easy target . “People like Franklin are convenient to use as foils in the struggle against...