Utah Bar Journal

Since 1965, the Salt Lake Legal Defender Association (LDA) has provided criminal defense attorneys to represent indigent defendants in Salt Lake County. John Hill, the group’s executive director and one of its early felony attorneys, announced his retirement this summer after thirty-seven years with LDA. Attorneys and staff members, known more for their smart aleck comments during staff meetings than for their attentiveness, were struck dumb. “John certainly has a gift for the dramatic,” commented one attorney. Hill may have developed that gift during his career trying well over fifteen murder cases to Utah juries, several of them high-profile. “As a trial lawyer, he is as good as or better than anybody who has ever done it,” says Gil Athay, current chair of the LDA Board of Directors.

It may surprise some that Hill started his legal career as a Salt Lake City prosecutor. That didn’t last long. After two years with the city, he was approached by Athay, a lawyer he admired and director of LDA, and was invited to join the group. LDA had a staff of six: four lawyers and two secretaries. Hill soon found himself in the midst of a “very colorful time.”

“Salt Lake was a mini-New York in a kind of way that it isn’t now,” Hill recalls. Lawyers, police, and prosecutors gathered in the area of West Second South after the Salt Lake City establishments closed. “We saw many a sunrise and had a great deal of fun. It was a big part of my learning experience about the culture of being a lawyer and how real defense lawyers thought and practiced.”

When Athay left LDA, he offered the director’s job to thirty-one year old Hill. Not only was Hill director of the office, which had grown to include misdemeanor lawyers following the Argersinger decision, but it was his job to try all major cases in the office.

Hill was assigned all the murder cases, some of which made important law on appeal. State v. James, 512 P.2d 1031 (Utah 1973), decided in light of Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), established the defendant’s right to be tried by a twelve-man jury rather than an eight-man jury in a murder case. In State v. Cloud, 722 P.2d 750 (Utah 1986), the court’s admission of gruesome photographs of a homicide victim was found to be reversible error absent showing that the photographs had “essential evidentiary value” which outweighed the potential for unfair prejudice. That case also established the obligation of the jury to convict the defendant of manslaughter if there was reasonable doubt as to which degree of homicide he had committed.

Some cases Hill handled involved lurid facts: in State v. Bolsinger, 699 P.2d 1214 (Utah 1985), a woman was asphyxiated during sex with her boyfriend. The Utah Supreme Court reversed the conviction because the defendant’s confession that he pulled on the cord around her neck did not support an inference beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally or knowingly killed the victim or intended to cause her serious bodily injury. The Court called the incident “part of a consensual act of intercourse between two intoxicated persons in an atmosphere of tranquility,” and entered a conviction for manslaughter because the defendant was aware of and consciously disregarded a substantial risk of death. Id. 1218-19.

The case of State v. Gaxiola, 550 P.2d 1298 (Utah 1976), has a plot straight out of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Hill’s client was one of several prison inmates who stabbed another inmate, the prison’s boxing champ, to death. The jury refused to convict Gaxiola of capital murder, and instead convicted him of second degree murder, as there were so many knife wounds, even the pathologist could not tell whether the lethal wound was inflicted by Hill’s client.

At that point in his career, however, Hill seriously considered moving over to the prosecution side when David Yocum offered him a position as deputy district attorney. As he still preferred defense work, before deciding to move, Hill went to the LDA Board of Directors to see if the office, which up to that time had been a training ground for criminal defense lawyers, could become a career office. Hill wanted LDA to be “a place that young lawyers could be hired and trained and could practice their art and expect to become very good trial counsel.” Following the Furman decision, Hill recalls, Utah re-enacted the death penalty and the complexity of cases required experienced lawyers for indigent criminal defendants. (After Furman, Utah enacted laws requiring bifurcated trials, with separate guilt-innocence and sentencing phases.)

LDA’s board shared Hill’s foresight, and Hill began to implement the changes he envisioned by applying for federal grants. LDA became the first public defender group in the U.S. with federal funding to deal with career criminals. They also hired their first social worker and opened an office in St. George.

As Hill attempted to make the office more professional, he drew upon his college background in banking and finance and learned how to draw up budgets, obtain funding, develop better facilities in the office, and lower case loads. His next task was to convince his more experienced attorneys to become supervisors. From a group of heretical, nonconformist, rule-averse lawyers, he drew his team leaders. Hill sought to hire lawyers “that really cared about the client, who had a presence in the courtroom, and the ability to make a jury believe that they were sensible and that they believed in their client.”

Next, he vigorously pursued money for training: national trial academies for the new lawyers, capital case training for more experienced lawyers, and paid memberships to the Utah Criminal Defense Association of Lawyer for every lawyer. When he had hired the best people he could find, and put supervision in place, he “got out of the way.” His philosophy: “If the lawyers are here to represent people, they better have your support.” To provide this support, LDS has hired social workers, investigators, and polygraph examiners, and regularly funds expert witnesses. The office also provides Spanish lessons for attorneys and staff members.

“I always like to think that no lawyer ever walked out of this office feeling that they had been denied what they needed to do their case,” Hill says. Still, some requests for support must have been hard to swallow. When LDA attorney Ralph Dellapiana asked Hill to pay for an investigative team, including a certified court reporter, a certified interpreter and an investigator to accompany him to the middle of Chihuahua, Mexico, to look for a witness in a murder case, Hill did not hesitate to provide the resources. All Dellapiana knew was that the witness lived somewhere in a small town with dirt roads and no street names, but he also knew where the town’s nerve center would be – the panadería. When they walked in the door of the small bakery, the witness was there, buying bread. “We saved the client from a wrongful conviction,” remembers Dellapiana. “That trip to find the witness made all the difference.”

In addition to supporting his attorneys, Hill brought diversity to the office before that became a legal requirement, consistently hiring “people of diverse cultures and people of color.” His hiring practices led to his recognition by the Minority Bar Association, who gave Hill their Raymond Uno award in 2003.

In 1987, Hill responded to the increasing number of criminal appeals and the formation of the Utah Court of Appeals by creating an appellate division. That appellate division has handled many of the first impression criminal cases issued by Utah appellate courts since 1987.

The most recent phase of his career has been his commitment to restorative justice. “In the old days,” he recalls, “we’d finish the trial on Friday and the following Monday morning we’d see them back in jail and have to start all over again.” Drug courts, mental health courts, and homeless courts all are aimed at breaking the cycle of recidivism. Hill created the first felony drug court with Bud Ellet, deputy district attorney at the time, with former Third District Court Judge Dennis Fuchs presiding.

Hill the former trial warhorse believes that one of the challenges of drug court is that it has “confused” the roles of the prosecutor, judge, and defense attorney significantly:

The judge now has to be compassionate and caring, which is very uncomfortable, and a different position than they usually take. The prosecutor has to stand up and applaud when someone graduates. The defense attorney sometimes has to ask for jail time because they think the client is more likely to succeed if they’re sober in the program,

a position he finds ethically “very difficult.” He remains committed to the concept, however, as Salt Lake County struggles to find alternatives to incarceration of non-violent offenders. “I think it’s opened up a whole new avenue for our clients and our friends and relatives as well,” he adds.

As he retires, Hill believes the greatest need for reform and improvement in the area of criminal defense lies with capital murder laws. In addition, he finds that the sentencing enhancement statutes have become “confused. Even the best lawyers have difficulties at times keeping up with all the sentencing changes. We certainly aren’t sending clear messages, if that is what the legislature intends to do, to our citizens, as to what the elements of offenses are.”

Hill considers “developing great attorneys and giving them a chance to practice in an environment where they could be successful” to be his greatest accomplishment. Athay adds that under Hill’s leadership, LDA has earned nationwide attention. Recently, a federal appellate judge requested that LDA be presented as a model office in a national federal defender program.

LDA has grown from four lawyers and two secretaries during Hill’s tenure to sixty-nine lawyers and thirty staff members. The office represents 80 to 90% of the defendants charged with felonies in Utah’s most populated county, and provides a training ground for some attorneys, and a career office for others. As LDA continues to develop in size and complexity to address the needs of an even more complex criminal justice system, Hill will be spending his winters in St. George and his summers in Island Park, Idaho, working on conservation law issues, especially those affecting water law and fly-fishing.

An open house will be held to honor John Hill on September 24, 2008, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m, at the offices of Salt Lake Legal Defender Association, 424 East 500 South, Salt Lake City.

LDA attorneys Joan Watt, Cathy Roberts, Ralph Dellapiana, Sam Newton, Andrea Garland; LDA Board director Gil Athay, and staff member MerriLyn Diaz all contributed to the preparation of this article.