Lawyer at centre of controversies
Had advisory role in de-segregation ruling; negotiated with Fidel Castro
E. Barrett Prettyman Jr., a Washington lawyer who had an advisory role in the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregated schools, and who decades later investigated congressional corruption in the Abscam case, died Nov. 4 at a Washington-area hospital. He was 91.
The cause was a respiratory ailment, said his son, E. Barrett Prettyman III.
Prettyman, whose father was a prominent Washington, D.C., jurist, was a law clerk to three Supreme Court justices in the 1950s, an assistant to attorney general Robert Kennedy and, in later years, a mentor to current U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
In 1962, Prettyman negotiated with Cuban leader Fidel Castro for the release of prisoners taken in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation, and his clients later included General Motors, acclaimed writers such as Truman Capote and former Beatle John Lennon.
At the time of the Brown decision, Prettyman was a clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, who had drafted a separate opinion in support of the court’s unanimous decision regarding segregated schools. After reading Jackson’s concurring opinion, Prettyman realized it could be seen as, at best, a lukewarm endorsement of the full court’s ruling.
He composed a sharply worded memorandum in which he urged Jackson not to publish his separate opinion.
“I told him quite candidly,” he said in a 1996 interview with the Historical Society of the D.C. Circuit Court, “that I didn’t think much of the opinion, that it sounded more like a dissent than a concurring opinion.”
He argued that Jackson’s separate opinion would only undercut the force of the court’s unified ruling. Jackson ultimately agreed, and the opinion was never published.
Jackson died soon after the Brown decision, and Prettyman continued at the Supreme Court as a clerk to Felix Frankfurter and later to John Harlan. He is believed to have been the only person to serve as a law clerk to three justices in succession.
In 1955, Prettyman joined the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), where he took on First Amendment and death-penalty cases and established the firm’s appellate practice. He argued before the Supreme Court 19 times. Among the dozens of lawyers he mentored at Hogan Lovells was Roberts, who was named chief justice in 2005.
In 1961, Prettyman published Death and the Supreme Court, a non-fiction study of legal cases involving the death penalty. It won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best factual crime book. He later accompanied one of his clients, Capote, across the country for a series of interviews with deathrow inmates.
In the early 1980s, Prettyman was special counsel to the House ethics committee during the “Abscam” investigation, in which several congressmen were convicted of accepting bribes from a would-be Arab sheik in an undercover FBI sting.
Prettyman recommended that Democrat Michael Myers be expelled from the House of Representatives after he was caught taking $50,000 in cash.
“He used his influence as bait and barter to wring huge sums of money from those he thought could use his office,” Prettyman told the House committee, adding that Myers made “a mockery of the seat in which his constituents placed him.” Myers was the first member of Congress to be expelled since the Civil War.
In 1961, more than 1,000 Cuban exiles were taken prisoner after they attempted to invade their homeland with U.S. help. The next year, the administration of president John F. Kennedy asked Prettyman to arrange the release of the prisoners in exchange for more than $50 million in food and medical supplies.
During negotiations with Castro, Prettyman asked to see novelist Ernest Hemingway’s former home in Havana. Castro gave him a private tour.
Afterward, Castro agreed to allow many of the prisoners’ family members to leave as well. Prettyman joined many of them on their flight out of Cuba.