Leonard Davies is contemplating the efficacy of democracy and the American justice system today, just as he was 55 years ago.
The attorney, now pushing 85, lives in Durango, where he graduated from high school in 1957 before ultimately landing in Denver for law school.
In final scenes of the 1970 documentary, “Trial: The City and County of Denver vs. Lauren R. Watson,” a young Davies leans against the jury box takes a drag of his cigarette.
It was March 1969.
Standing next to him was Lauren Watson, the eloquent and imposing leader of the Denver Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, whom Davies had just successful defended against a set of relatively minor charges including resisting arrest.
The charged trial was one of the first, if not the first, to be televised in the country. And it spoke to the heat of a moment.
Watson’s arrested occurred Nov. 6, 1968, the day after Richard Nixon won the presidency. The Panther alleged that the young Denver police officer who had stopped him had previously driven by Watson’s home, raised a fist and yelled “white power” earlier on the day of the incident.
“Don’t you think, really Lauren, that there might be just one small element in this that the system of justice we have may be a good one?” Davies asked.
“No,” the Panther replied.
“What would you replace it with?” Davies inquired, seemingly directing the question to Watson as much as himself.
Watson expounded the injustices baked into the justice system.
“It’s a just system for white people – you know, for some white people,” he said. “For middle class and upper it’s a just system. For poor people, for Black people, it’s an injust system.”
Watson’s ultimate conclusion offended the young attorney then, and it still does now.
“I should’ve resisted arrest,” he said. “I should’ve killed both of them (police officers) when they came in the door.”
He was offended because although he saw a system rife with injustice, the Watson trial was an example of that system nonetheless working.
The two men remained friends, and Davies delivered a eulogy at Watson’s funeral in 2019.
Davies parrots an apocryphal line often attribute to Winston Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government of history, except all the others that have been tried.”
The octogenarian attorney made his career defending the civil liberties of those disfavored by the justice system.
Shortly after he graduated from law school, Davies put an end to an extortive bail system in Fort Lupton that bankrolled local government using the forfeited bonds of migrant workers arrested on public intoxication charges.
He also helped found a free legal clinic in Denver.
“I just didn’t see how you could possibly charge to go into court and defend the Constitution,” he said.
Violence as a tactic, though understandable, remains “abhorrent” to Davies.
He views the great protests of the 1960s – the ones responsible for pushing through the Civil Rights Act and ending the Vietnam War – as salient lessons for a new generation of young people.
“I have despaired, until this recently, that the young people in the country are indifferent,” he said.
The ongoing student protests objecting to the war in Gaza, where Israel has killed an estimated 40,000 people in response to a Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, have given him some hope.
But looking around, Davies is inclined to note the prevalence of the same social ills that were present in the 1960s.
The parallel lines are obvious to him.
The cries of “bring ’em home” calling for an end to the war in Vietnam bear a resemblance to the student protests calling for an end to the war in Gaza; George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was “a precursor of much of what’s going on now,” Davies said, in a thinly veiled reference to former President Donald Trump.
“At an early age, I was afraid that the last case I ever had would be exactly the same as the first case,” Davies said.
He was right.
Davies says he still sees bias and crosscutting interests in the justice system. And he has grand ideas on the overhauls necessary.
“I think there are changes that have to be made,” he said. “But as a system, I don’t know what one in the world is any better, as a system, for finding out and dispensing justice.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
