Pioneering lawyer fought to release the innocent
Forgotten nowadays, Maris was a pioneer of prisoner advocacy during a 56-year legal career in Philly. He estimated that he helped free about 300 convicts — from condemned killers to petty thieves — through an avocation that began in the 1920s and continued until he died of a heart attack in 1960, at age 80. His motivation was simple. “I believed that some men in prison did not deserve to be there,” he once told a magazine writer. As a Quaker, he opposed capital punishment.
Born in 1880, Maris grew up in Germantown, a few miles from the medieval-style edifice of Eastern State prison. He attended the University of Michigan, then returned to his hometown to earn a law degree at Penn.
He prospered as a corporate lawyer and was a founding partner in 1924 of White, Parry and Maris, antecedent of today’s giant White and Williams LLP.
The work was lucrative but uninspiring to a white-shoe lawyer with a public defender’s crusading soul.
While tending his business clients, Maris watched with interest an emerging debate in legal circles about the extent of the American justice system’s fallibility. In 1923, Learned Hand, a revered federal appeals court judge, wrote that U.S. courts were “haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted.”
“It is an unreal dream,” Hand declared.
Scholars like Edwin Borchard, a Yale University law professor, rebutted Hand’s position by cataloging dozens of nightmarish examples of known wrongful convictions.
This prompted Maris to begin snooping around Eastern State.
He insisted on face-to-face sitdowns with those claiming false convictions. A newspaperman wrote that Maris had “an uncanny sense of who was guilty and who was getting a raw deal by the justice system.”
Over many years, he uncovered archetypal examples of the same issues that still induce wrongful convictions today: deadwrong witnesses, false confessions wrung out by bullying cops, junk evidence, dishonest prosecutors, terrible defense attorneys and a reliance on shady snitches motivated to lie.
He often took on lost-cause cases — and frequently lost in spite of fancy legal footwork.
He worked on behalf of Henry Epler and George Riehm, convicted in the 1928 murder of a Reading, Pa., cop. Maris thought the youths had been coerced into pleading guilty on a hollow promise of leniency as their defense attorney drowsed.
Maris filed a writ of coram nobis, an obscure claim of legal error. He did not prevail, but the attention he drew to the case led to early parole for the alleged offenders.
His tour de force exoneration concerned another shootout with police.
Frank Harris and Wilbert MacQueen were stopped and questioned by two officers as they prowled center city Philadelphia at 2 a.m. on March 4, 1926.
All four parties to the curbside confab were carrying pistols, and soon they were blazing. A cop was hit in the wrist, Harris was wounded in the shoulder, and MacQueen was killed with a bullet to the left side of his torso.
Harris, 29, was convicted of murdering his friend and sent to prison for life.
For 20 years, he grumbled to cellmates that he had not shot MacQueen. In 1946, Harris got a chance to make his case during one of Maris’ visits to Eastern State.
The attorney went to work.
Maris found that Harris’ old .38, still in police evidence, had been loaded with unjacketed lead bullets. The police were firing metaljacketed ammo, the type of bullet that killed MacQueen.
Maris collected affidavits from the gun and bullet manufacturers that excluded Harris’ .38 as the murder weapon, and he commissioned technical drawings based upon trial testimony showing that Harris could not have shot MacQueen in the left side.
Gov. James Duff freed Harris, who walked out of Eastern State with a suit of clothes on his back and a sawbuck in his pocket in July 1947.
A broadsheet headline trumpeted Maris’ feat:
SCIENCE FREES MAN 21 YEARS IN PRISON;
Lawyer’s Long, Patient Study of Ballistics and Weapon Clears Pennsylvania ‘Lifer’
Late in life, Maris won national notice when Herbert Gordon, a producer for Ziv Television, used the attorney’s work to create “Lock Up,” a syndicated melodrama whose 78 episodes aired from 1959 to 1961. (Maris died midway through the run.)
Actor Macdonald Carey starred as Maris, unraveling knots in fictionalized accounts of the attorney’s work.
Each episode, newly available on YouTube, features this homage: “These stories are based on the files and case histories of Herbert L. Maris, prominent attorney, who has devoted his life to saving the innocent.”