AADL Talks To: Hugh "Buck" Davis

Fri, 12/09/2011 - 12:35pm

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Hugh M. "Buck" Davis, a lawyer with the Detroit National Lawyers Guild, worked with Chicago Seven Trial lawyers William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass to represent John Sinclair, Pun Plamondon, and Jack Forrest in Ann Arbor's CIA Bombing Conspiracy case. In this interview, Davis talks about his life as an unrepentant radical lawyer; the importance of Judge Damon J. Keith's famous "Keith Decision"; and reflects on the personalities of former White Panther friends and clients.

Transcript

• [00:00:04.76] AMY: Hi. This is Amy.
• [00:00:06.38] ANDREW: And this is Andrew. And in this episode, AADL talks to radical lawyer Buck Davis.
• [00:00:13.25] AMY: Davis talks about his life as an unrepentant radical lawyer, the importance of Judge Damon J. Kieth's famous Keith's Decision, and reflects on the personalities of former White Panther friends and clients.
• [00:00:25.50] HUGH DAVIS: I came to Detroit dodging the draft in 1968. I was stunned to find that the war was still going on when I got out of law school. It was pretty clear to me my mother hadn't raised any soldiers. I was supposed to go over to Harvard Business School from law school. My first wife is teaching over there by then, and I was going to take my MBA.
• [00:00:50.09] But a funny thing happened on the way to Wall Street. I tried to stack degrees. My draft board said no. So it was either join the Army, go to jail, or join VISTA, the Volunteers in Service to America.
• [00:01:06.01] I chose VISTA. We cancelled our plans to get married. And unbeknownst to me, VISTA had a secret policy of isolating you as much as possible from your prior support network. So every place I said I wanted to go were the ones that they x-ed off.
• [00:01:32.22] And never having been in a state which didn't border the Atlantic Ocean, except Pennsylvania, they sent me to Chicago on August 28, 1968 in the middle of the Democratic Convention, put me up in the downtown Y, one block from where Humphrey was staying at the Conrad Hilton. Ralph Abernathy and the Poor People's Campaign were also staying at the Y.
• [00:02:00.35] I had been having an idyllic summer in Cambridge and was not politically motivated at all, except by my desire to avoid the draft. We landed in Chicago and demonstrations had been going on for two or three days. I'd been unaware of them.
• [00:02:22.15] I saw all these cops along the streets on the way down to the Y, got into the Y, thought I'd go out and see what it was like, saw some smoke, went out to where it was, turned out to be tear gas. The hippies running the other way grabbed me and took me with them to keep me from getting run over by the cops who were rapidly charging then got me to a fountain where I washed the tear gas out of my face.
• [00:02:52.03] Once I figured out what was going on, I decided I was going to overthrow the government. So I went back to the Y, tore up a t-shirt, tried my glasses on, took a couple of hits of speed, and went back out to Grant Park and stayed there for three days. And then I was too scared to stay in Chicago. And at that point, Detroit had the only discount flights between Boston and Detroit. Wednesday night at 12 o'clock you call up Mohawk Airlines, get a $49 round trip, so my fiance could come out and visit me.
• [00:03:32.01] I have my first meal in Detroit at the Burger King in the Greyhound station. I spent my first night in Detroit in the barracks at the downtown YMCA. I rapidly got to use a four bedroom brick house, which the Methodists had abandoned to the Mexicans. And for $60 a month, less than the utilities, I lived like a king, making $48 a week without a car the year after the rebellion in Detroit.
• [00:04:01.46] AMY: That's a way better answer than I was expecting. That's a great story.
• [00:04:07.97] ANDREW: Well, when did you decide to start pursuing cases for people who were being harassed or discriminated against?
• [00:04:15.54] HUGH DAVIS: Well, that was it. That was my political conversion. Back then, the war on poverty really was a war on poverty, rather than a war on the poor. And I was assigned to what was known as the Kennedy-esque component of the legal services program, community legal counsel.
• [00:04:36.26] And we had our office in a downtown office building right next door to Carl Levin who's now our Senator and Art Tarnow, who's a federal judge. And my first boss was the son of socialists. And we were not supposed to do individual cases. We were supposed to do group representation.
• [00:05:00.73] So I started off representing the United Tenants for Collective Action, which were organizing rent strikes around the city of Detroit. It was a wonderful time. Revolution was in the air. They didn't want '67 to happen again.
• [00:05:20.66] They would throw money at you. You could write a grant for anything. They would give it to you. You could do anything you wanted to.
• [00:05:29.95] In January of '69, the Jefferies Action Committee was formed by the welfare rights organization called West Side Mothers and one branch of the Detroit division of the Black Panther Party. And we took public housing out on rent strike, pretty much ended up taking every project out.
• [00:05:57.43] Ran for about three years. We never lost one. We made them form the Board of Tenant Affairs and all of that sort of stuff. In the meantime, I got to know more and more these leftist lawyers, like Cockrel and Ravitz and Reosti and people who were a whole lot more interesting than the people I grew up with in Richmond, Virginia.
• [00:06:23.85] So after my year of VISTA when I was safely past the draft, I applied for a fellowship and got it. It was called the Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship, which paid a magnificent sum of $10,000 and allowed me to get married. And my wife came to Detroit.
• [00:06:48.00] I determined that this is where I was going to have on fellowship. And because my money came from Washington, they couldn't control me. I was a poster boy for why they got rid of legal services.
• [00:07:03.43] I opened up the National Lawyers Guild office in Detroit in January of 1970 and represented or organized the representation of everybody who got busted for either anti-war, civil rights activity for the next two years. Then the fellowship ran out. And by that time I was a father, and I had to go out into private practice.
• [00:07:29.27] I went with the hardest core left law firm that I could. I continued my political representation because I had determined that because of my male and white skin privilege had gotten me out of the draft, I would defend anybody who opposed the war for free until it was over, which I did until the fall of Saigon in May of '75. Then my partner said, Davis, you're our only trial lawyer. You got go to work, so I started suing people and graduated into civil rights law suing the government. And that's pretty much how I've lived since that time.
• [00:08:13.87] AMY: Did you know John Sinclair and some of these folks before you were involved in the case?
• [00:08:18.24] HUGH DAVIS: No.
• [00:08:19.03] AMY: No. HUGH DAVIS: I had some very awareness of his existence, and I had some vague awareness of the bombings that were going on in Detroit in the fall of '68 when I first got here. But by that time, the White Panthers had moved to Ann Arbor, John was in prison, and I was working with the hard core urban poor. And I knew that Chuck Ravitz, one of my mentors, had been representing Sinclair for a long time and was still working on the case, but I didn't know any of them.
• [00:09:01.44] And then, as you saw in that letter, I'd been representing the Black Panthers for a year, and I was sick of them. He had been representing the White Panthers for four or five years. He was sick of them. So in early August, we decided to trade for a year.
• [00:09:19.31] And two weeks later Plamondon got busted in the Upper Peninsula. And then they walked in and said we're going to go get Kunstler and Weinglass, and I said, OK, well, I'll do it, figuring that it would never work. They did, and off we went.
• [00:09:35.17] ANDREW: Did it create difficulties for you personally or professionally, having to defend people who were hated by a large segment of population and the establishment itself?
• [00:09:46.68] HUGH DAVIS: I pretty never represented anybody but that. What can I say?
• [00:09:53.95] ANDREW: And has it made things difficult for you?
• [00:09:55.47] HUGH DAVIS: Well, my law firm only has one rule. We don't beat up little guys for big guys. And politically, I was learning. I had had what would be called a classic liberal arts education growing up and going to schools and college in the segregated South. But I was very naive, very unprepared for any of this stuff.
• [00:10:34.45] I'd crammed an enormous amount of knowledge in my head. I don't know if you remember the old GE College Bowl, but I was responsible when my college was on for all literature ever written plus current events. So I had this enormous amount of knowledge which meant absolutely nothing to me.
• [00:10:56.29] And I remember standing by the elevator in the Penobscot building in Detroit about two months into it, and my boss, Ron Reosti, came up to me and he said, Davis, no wonder nothing makes sense for you. You're thinking about it from the point of view of capitalism. Think about it from the point of view of socialism. Well, its was like Saul on the road to Damascus. The scales fell away from my eyes, and I spent the next 10 years re-reading world history, literature, political science from a Marxist, socialist, whatever you want to call it, perspective.
• [00:11:35.20] And as a staff attorney in the Guild office, I had to represent every political tendency, which meant that I read every one of their papers trying to figure out who I thought was right and who I thought was wrong. That's just what I've done. Having to face the draft was the best thing that ever happened to me. Otherwise, I would have been miserable somewhere on the East Coast, probably in New York.
• [00:12:01.18] AMY: We, of course, would like to talk to you about the big trial, the US v. John Sinclair, which then became United States v.-- Yeah. Which is confusing, I think, for a lot of people who maybe have a vague understanding of what happened. And I'm wondering if you would mind giving us just a brief overview.
• [00:12:24.78] HUGH DAVIS: Are you talking about the facts or are you talking about the law or politics?
• [00:12:28.21] AMY: At this point, just the facts.
• [00:12:29.84] HUGH DAVIS: OK. There was a crazy guy by the name of David Valor who lived in Detroit in the fall of 1968. He was some petty bourgeois suburban whatever and a disaffected counterculturalist seriously into dope and LSD. And somehow or another, he got his hand on a lot of dynamite. So there were eight bombings in Detroit that year.
• [00:13:09.17] And since I wrote that paper, I've had somebody write me an anecdote that I didn't know. He was walking down the street near all the hippie communes near Wayne State University when some of the other revolutionaries were sitting on their front porch. And the 13th Precinct is right down the road.
• [00:13:32.93] And Nick-- I can't use his name-- a guy was sitting there, a guy who's known to be a hard core lefty. And Valor pulls up his shirt and say he's got all this dynamite and his whatever and says, why don't you come on down to the 13th Precinct with me? I'm going to blow up one of the cars in a parking lot. The guy says no.
• [00:14:04.88] Valor says, what Che Guevara think about you refusing to blow up a police car? And the guy said back, what would Che Guevara think of you blowing up an empty police car? That'll give you some idea of what it was like.
• [00:14:22.64] One of the bombings was a CIA recruiting office in Ann Arbor. And somebody threw a couple of sticks of dynamite, I think smashed a window and threw the sticks of dynamite inside. And that lay fallow for some time. But by that time, John had gone to prison and Valor became crazier and crazier.
• [00:14:50.38] And finally, he turned himself in to the editor of The Detroit News, and he confessed to all these bombings, and he whatever. But they kept pressing him. And he ultimately said that his confederate in these bombings was Jack Forrest and that he had met with Sinclair and that Sinclair had said he didn't want any dynamite himself, but he might take some for somebody else. And somehow or another, Valor claimed that Plamondon told him that he had done the CIA bombing and claimed that Sinclair had been in the same room with him and gazed at him meaningfully and shook his head yes after the CIA bombing. And that became the White Panther CIA bombing conspiracy case.
• [00:15:47.22] When Plamondon heard about it, he became a fugitive because he had cases all over the country, I mean he was a walking felon. But he couldn't stand it, the underground life, because it was too austere. And so he came back, even though he was the first FBI Top 10 revolutionary who was white. And he got busted, theoretically, for throwing a beer can out of a van on his way to a hiding place in the Upper Peninsula.
• [00:16:23.40] The case started. They got Kunstler and Weinglass. That was what we had to defend. Damon Keith got the case, a civil rights hero and legend. And I was the local counsel and represented Forrest.
• [00:16:41.42] We filed all these motions. By that time, there was a growing awareness of the government's wiretap program. And as we were doing throughout the radical lawyer network around the country at that time, we filed a motion for disclosure of electronic surveillance, and they came back and said, yeah, we got something.
• [00:17:06.64] So then once they admitted they had it, Keith had everybody brief whether it was legal or not. And about a month later in January of '71, Keith ruled that it was illegal and ordered them to turn it over to us. And they said no.
• [00:17:32.21] And we thought that what they were gonna do was say, hey, judge, tell you what. Let's have the trial, and then after the trial's over listen to the tapes. And if you think that anything on the tapes would have effect the trial, OK. But we say it doesn't, and therefore we shouldn't have to turn this over.
• [00:17:51.71] And Keith said, no, you've got to turn it over. And they said, you don't understand, judge. We're never going to turn it over, before or after the trial. And they never have. And he said, OK, Mr. Kunstler, make your motion. Kunstler moved to dismiss.
• [00:18:11.05] The government begged for five days to get a stay from the Court of Appeals. He gave it to them. The government picked this case. They're the ones that decided they were going to make this the test case. The issue was coming through other judges in other--
• [00:18:28.51] Black Panther case in LA, Judge Ferguson had ruled their way. But that was post-conviction, which meant all the transcripts and all the stuff and then the whole regular appeal process. They didn't want to wait. They wanted it validated, and they picked this case.
• [00:18:42.91] AMY: Why?
• [00:18:43.24] ANDREW: Yeah. Why did they pick this case?
• [00:18:44.91] HUGH DAVIS: We have no idea. Nobody knows.
• [00:18:47.35] AMY: Do you have a best guess?
• [00:18:49.45] HUGH DAVIS: One, I think they knew that the wiretaps didn't have anything to do with the trial. We think the wiretaps-- not for a long time-- were a NSA intercept. Because when Plamondon first went underground, he went to Algeria. And he was there with Eldridge Cleaver. and they were calling back to the States, and we think that the NSA-- which is now known, but at that point even Congress didn't know that the NSA existed-- and so we think it was an NSA intercept from Algeria to the Black Panther Party headquarters in Oakland. And that's the reason that we think that it really didn't have anything to do with the case.
• [00:19:37.87] So one, they knew that it was clean and the waters couldn't be muddied. And two, it was pretrial. And three, it was this obscure band of hippies in Michigan not many people had ever heard of. And the ones that had, including us in Detroit, thought just a bunch of white poseurs, although they turned out to be more substantial than we thought.
• [00:20:17.01] So maybe they thought they would have an easier ride because these guys wouldn't have the support infrastructure network, whatever, whatever, whatever. And they could have gotten a lot of judges, and practically any judge down on that bench at that time, they could've won their motion, or at least the judge wouldn't have made them turn it over. It was just everything had to fall exactly right for it to happen, but that's what happened.
• [00:20:46.46] ANDREW: Why do you think they wanted it decided at that moment? Why did they decide it was time to test out the wiretap water? Is it because they were escalating their wiretapping program and they knew they were going to get caught up in it soon?
• [00:20:59.96] HUGH DAVIS: Oh, by that time in 1970, early '71, there were major anti-war conspiracies and Black Panther conspiracies all over the country, Connecticut, Chicago, San Francisco. And then there were the Weather Underground. The Weathermen had split off in the fall of '69 from SDS, and they were all over the country and otherwise finding out how many people you can sleep with in a short period of time living in one house. So they had a lot of fish in the fire that they were frying.
• [00:21:48.87] And the courts were going to make a good decision. And they wanted the right established before the fact that they had illegally wiretapped everybody. And the wiretapping which just the most benign part of the cointel program. Assassinations, provocateurs, agents whatever.
• [00:22:20.67] So this is the gentler, kinder COINTELPRO. The White Panthers got the easy ride. So I take that they really felt like they had to have it, and if they waited until it percolated all the way through, if it lost then they really had a problem.
• [00:22:47.09] AMY: So it went to the Supreme Court. And they upheld it unanimously. And what is your view of the impact of it politically and legally, of the Keith Decision.
• [00:22:58.44] HUGH DAVIS: The White Panthers saved the movement, straight up. They dropped every anti-war Black Panther, Weatherman conspiracy in the country, because every one them was tainted. So I'm telling you, that case, people don't realize it, but they were getting ready to kick our ass.
• [00:23:25.68] And we snuck up on them in the mid to early '60s with the civil rights, the anti-war, and the youth and the culture and then the women and then the environment and all that. But it's not like the slave holders weren't gathering for their revenge. And they were going to dismantle the left and gave us eight years until Reagan. They started on the program which they are still embarked upon.
• [00:24:01.42] ANDREW: So you were a young lawyer, and you got to work very closely with people like Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy and Len Weinglass. What did you learn from them? What were you? 27? 28? Something like that at the time?
• [00:24:14.07] HUGH DAVIS: 27. It was like having as much fun as you can have, all day every day. Get high, go to work, fuck the government, and then go home and get high again. And in the meantime, have a few drinks and find somebody to sleep with. What can I tell you? And I've tried to keep it up as much as possible.
• [00:24:39.84] AMY: Compared to everything else, compared to the other pretrial motions, this is a small thing. But I read that one of the things that came up was the issue of the age of the jury, the potential jury, and also the length of hair. Did you have long hair at the time? Were you sort of a--
• [00:24:58.72] HUGH DAVIS: Fairly long. My hair was never as long as the White Panthers, but my hair was longer than anybody I had ever known before I got to Detroit. And by a couple of years later, it was fairly long.
• [00:25:11.09] AMY: Judge Keith dismissed both the claim that there needed to be younger jurors and that long hair more accurately represented the counterculture. What did you think about all of that? Were those things that you felt were significant?
• [00:25:23.91] HUGH DAVIS: Well, at the time the slogan "Don't Trust Anybody over 30" was damn near true. Right now, I'd go the other way. Don't trust anybody under 30. A bunch of Hitler Youth. But yeah.
• [00:25:46.37] We believed that our clients with their lifestyle just weren't going to go down with the average federal juror. But making age a class was the old age anti-discrimination act hadn't yet been passed. So if you look at it as the opening shot of creating age as a suspect category and for purposes of discrimination, it was a nice little opening shot.
• [00:26:20.60] Second, in state court we did the Wayne County jury challenge where anybody on welfare, anybody with an afro, and it would be right there on the questionnaires. And so when we did the I think it was the New Bethel case where a couple of cops got shot outside a church, Aretha Franklin's father's church, when the Republic of New Afrika was having a convention there. And some cops got too close, and somebody shot them.
• [00:27:04.20] And Cockrel and Ravitz did that case. And Neil Bush and I, Neil was also part of the defense team on this case, we worked on the Wayne County jury challenge, and that we blew that system wide open and permanently changed the complexion, no pun intended, of jurors in Wayne County.
• [00:27:25.69] And it was the beginning of a wave of jury challenges. So We didn't win those, but they weren't unrelated to the overall legal and political struggle.
• [00:27:38.09] ANDREW: You mentioned before the tapes that were being discussed in this case and the tapes of the later wiretaps of the White Panther Party. The contents of those have never been released. And I'm confused about how the government can keep things classified that they obtained illegally. How does that work?
• [00:27:56.89] Ask Bradley Manning. How did they lock him up for stuff that he downloads off the internet and whatever? There's nothing honest. OK? There's nothing honest about the system. It will protect itself. And it will protect itself in any way that it has to to protect itself.
• [00:28:19.04] Classic Marxist analyses, imperialism rules by bribery and corruption at home and by terror and violence abroad. Lucky us, we live in the bribery and corruption division. They don't kill that many white lawyers.
• [00:28:33.67] But the idea that there's anything honest about the courts, about the Congress, about the executives, that's just not true. And therefore, if you get close enough to beating them, they'll change the rules, or they'll ignore the rules. And what are you going to do? You don't have an army. And therefore, that's the political answer that question.
• [00:29:01.44] You can't litigate your way to liberation. You can't legislate your way to liberation. That's just not going to happen. You either build a big enough movement to where the Army won't shoot you, or you aren't going to make correlation, as we're getting to watch a lot of little experiments in that particular process right now.
• [00:29:23.74] And it's different in each country and whatever. But one thing's for sure, they're ready. We're never going to sneak up on them again. And if we can't organize it from the inside and outside, like in Wisconsin where the cops and the firefighters wouldn't go for it, that's how you win.
• [00:29:39.95] And so legally, if anyone has ever tried to get the tapes that were involved in the underlying case, that is the CIA bombing conspiracy case, I don't know who would have done it. And once we won that case-- We didn't win that case until January of '72, '73. We just had a lot to do, and making our own industry wasn't a part of it.
• [00:30:23.68] Second, with regard to the second wiretap, I've got those. I know what they say. But I can't reveal them because they're under a protective order. I've got the legal memorandum written, and I'm working with reporters and some declassification experts in Washington. But again, there's a lot to be done. That's still not at the top of the list.
• [00:30:54.41] And so maybe one day when we liberate the Pentagon or the FBI or the CIA or the NSA, we'll get it. But up until then, if I got to choose, it's not going to be number one.
• [00:31:10.41] AMY: I'm curious about what you thought of the White Panthers and the 10-Point system and everything at the time. And you had said earlier that, at first, that they were viewed as sort of just a side group, a fringe group not to worry about. And then you realized that they had more of an impact, or they were more significant ultimately.
• [00:31:30.62] HUGH DAVIS: Yeah.
• [00:31:31.00] AMY: Can you talk a little bit more about that?
• [00:31:33.02] HUGH DAVIS: Well, one, I am now and always have been culturally ignorant. OK? I remember my friends-- they reminded me of it. I'd forgotten about it-- but I remember when I tried to read the entire encyclopedia in the seventh and eighth grades. And music never meant much to me, one way or the other, '60s rock and roll, fraternity house and Animal House fraternity boy and that sort of stuff when I was college. And got knocked out primarily by Dylan in '63, but I didn't keep going and keep following it in any real sense.
• [00:32:25.46] And growing up in the South when I did, there wasn't much blues, and we looked down on the hillbillies and the mountain music and the roots music and that sort of stuff. And race music was-- Even though Doug Clark and his famous Hot Nuts used to come to my college and play for fraternity parties, and so did the Isley Brothers, whatever. But that just never was where I was. OK?
• [00:33:06.24] So that's one thing. A lot of the cultural stuff that John and all of them were immersed in was relatively foreign to me.
• [00:33:16.57] Second, when I said I decided to overthrow the government, I wasn't kidding. And in my view, the revolutionary forces weren't going to come from these people. They were going to come from minorities and workers. And my roots were in the city, and that's where I was building up my coterie of comrades, the Motor City Labor League, to Control, Conflict, and Change book club. Big organizations that were making big differences. Ended up electing Ravitz to first Marx judge.
• [00:33:54.92] And we dropped out. I dropped out when it was pretty clear to me that the only thing Kenny Cockrel wanted to do was be mayor of Detroit. And it was pretty clear to me that that wasn't what I signed up for.
• [00:34:08.15] John was in prison. I didn't know him. He's pretty much an asshole. Was then, is now. Even though he's mellowed a lot. But John's an extremely self-centered, difficult person. And he's writing letters from prisons telling people to storm the barricades. And you try to keep 40 people alive without a job and put out a free newspaper every week living in two houses on Hill Street, and he wants more and more and more.
• [00:34:37.45] The real hero was his brother, David Sinclair. A man's man. Or I assume that's too macho to say these days. But between David and Leni, they're the ones. They're the ones that raised the money. They're the ones that organized the benefits that kept the organization running, whatever.
• [00:35:02.96] Pun's in prison. John's gone. And so the people who did this were not John. David and I got to be very good friends. And I would go with him to visit John in prison, and I would come up and stay at the White Panther house. And it was a lot of fun. And I have particularly fond memories of certain of the Panther ladies.
• [00:35:31.91] But David was harder core on the political front than John was. And I was always struggling with David about, hey, man, real Marxism, real revolution, whatever. And I didn't understand it. On the other hand, he was closer to me than the others.
• [00:35:53.57] So I have since come to appreciate, to some extent, the depth and the innovative and bold and progressive nature and have discarded some of my doctrinaire hard core Marxist, Leninist view of youth culture and that sort of stuff. And I consider them to be significant.
• [00:36:28.11] But at the time, I had taken up this job, and I had to finish it. And I didn't finish it until the summer of '73 when-- oh, yeah. That's right. The decision was in '72. And '73 was Pun's last bust up in Cadillac when we went up and stole the town and snuck one past them, slept with the judge's girlfriend and all of that, got out of Dodge before they could figure out what happened.
• [00:37:10.49] It was a four-year ride for me. And I spent a lot of time. It cost me my first marriage. My wife finally took my daughter and moved. And I paid a lot.
• [00:37:25.69] AMY: Pun, in his book, he describes you as being pretty fed up with him by the last time he got busted. Pretty upset. Had you just had it by then?
• [00:37:36.84] HUGH DAVIS: Well, after 18 felonies, what are you gonna say? He was a wonderful guy to be around and to party with. But he was uncontrollable. And I was moving in a more serious political direction and moving toward being a cadre in a democratic centralist organization, which was kind of like the opposite of the White Panthers. So there was tension within my law firm and tension within my political organization.
• [00:38:11.61] But on the other hand, you see that Sheila Cockrel, or Sheila Murphy, supposedly a member of what is called the LDC, the Labor Defense Coalition, that's the reason she was on the bill at the Ten for Two concert because of the influence that I had with the White Panthers and that Chuck had, Chuck Ravitz had, for representing John all those years.
• [00:38:39.28] But there was definitely, by the end-- The Cadillac case, the marijuana extortion case, it was a frame-up, and we convinced the judge of that. And he gave his opinion. We waived the jury in that case because we couldn't find a fair jury in Cadillac, and they do that. And we had a fair judge. And when he gave his opinion, he says, I've been in love with the state police for 20 years, but this case has convinced me they should not be involved in politics.
• [00:39:12.23] And so we get him convicted of a 20-year felony, and he gives him probation, a guy that has 18 felonies. That one was a great escape.
• [00:39:30.06] I know them all. I liked them all. I didn't understand quite how talented they were, that they really were remarkable and a remarkable group of individuals who have gone on, in their own way, to do remarkable things. And so I'd have to say that I was a little bit blind to the opportunities that I had. And I was a little bit arrogant.
• [00:40:00.02] And [INAUDIBLE] I was a little bit older, except maybe than John. I can't tell you, aside from Pun and John and David and Leni and Linda Ross, that I had close relationships with them. And I wasn't here in the early part.
• [00:40:26.02] I didn't get here until '68. So all the really neat stuff that went down between '65 and '67 with the East Grande Ballroom and all of that stuff. I wasn't here for that. I probably wouldn't have had anything to do with it if I been, but so what?
• [00:40:44.32] But on the other hand, I would say that they've made up for it by referring me a lifetime supply of marijuana defendants that have helped me keep my practice alive. And also a lifetime supply of free dope. So I figure I've broken even with them by now.
• [00:41:15.28] ANDREW: I only have one more question, which is how did you get name Buck?
• [00:41:18.19] HUGH DAVIS: Nobody knows.
• [00:41:19.71] ANDREW: It's just been with you since you were a kid?
• [00:41:22.42] HUGH DAVIS: There are two theories. And I don't remember. Theoretically, when I was real young, like two or three, my father used to throw me in the air and catch me and call me buckshot. And it might have started there.
• [00:41:41.72] When I was in the second and third grade, people still played marbles. And I was the best. And in that little part of Virginia where I lived at that time, if you won somebody's marbles, you were said to have bucked them. And I won so much that they called me Bucky. And it stuck. I never got rid of it.
• [00:42:19.39] My second wife thought that I had sold my birthright for a mess of pottage and wanted me to be called Hugh and join the Harvard Law School Association and get tailored suits from the international tailors over in Canada. And I went along with it. But it made all my friends totally weird. "Boho Hugh," whatever.
• [00:42:52.56] And then I've given up. It's embarrassing to grow with a juvenile nickname, but there's nothing I can do about it. And the Free Press has long adopted the style Hugh "Buck" Davis. And if you google me, that's what you get. So I can't do anything about it.
• [00:43:16.66] ANDREW: To learn more about Buck Davis, go to freeingjohnsinclair.org.
• [00:43:22.75] AMY: AADL talks to Buck Davis has been a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.