Rights lawyer took on capital appeals, wrongful convictions

Eleanor Jackson Piel, a civil rights lawyer renowned for handling wrongful convictions and death row appeals — once securing a reprieve for a man 16 hours before he was to be executed — died Nov. 26 at her home in Austin, Texas. She was 102.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Eleanor P. Womack.

Piel was noted not only for her courtroom mettle but also for her professional longevity: She practiced law for seven decades, until she was in her early 90s. For much of that time she was a solo practitioner, first in Los Angeles and later, from the mid-1950s on, in New York.

At midcentury — a time when few women went into law and fewer still took up criminal law — Piel helped win victories for clients as diverse as interned Japanese Americans prosecuted as World War II draft resisters; a teenage math prodigy determined to attend Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan (then for boys only) despite her sex; and, in a case argued before the Supreme Court, a white teacher denied service at a Mississippi lunch counter because she was with a group of Black students.

One of her most celebrated victories came in a Florida capital appeal familiarly known as the case of the Death Row Brothers. It centered on the 1979 murder of a woman near Dade City, roughly 40 miles north of Tampa. The victim, who remained unidentified for some time, had been strangled, doused with gasoline and set aflame.

Under pressure to solve the case, police arrested two men who by their lights were, Piel later wrote, “available and disposable”: William Riley Jent, a biker, and his half brother Earnie Miller, a roofer, police said.

Tried separately, the brothers were convicted and sentenced to death.

Piel joined the appeal as a volunteer in the summer of 1982, representing Jent; a Florida public defender, Howardene Garrett, represented Miller. Their execution was scheduled for July 1983.

The lawyers found that the police and prosecutors had deliberately misidentified the victim in order to spin a narrative of the crime that implicated the brothers; suborned perjury from more than one witness; and intimidated another witness who had seen the actual murder, could identify the victim and was prepared to testify that someone else — the victim’s boyfriend — had been the killer.

“We worked around the clock, day and night, through the week before the execution date,” Piel wrote in a 2003 essay about the case. “Computers and their printers were not so available then; we had only typewriters.”

Piel and Garrett appealed the conviction to the Florida Supreme Court in Tallahassee, which ruled against them. With less than 16 hours remaining, they petitioned Judge George C. Carr of the U.S. District Court in Tampa for a stay of execution.

“The judge had before him all the pleadings we had filed in the state courts,” Piel wrote. “Judge Carr looked at the stack of paper and declared: ‘I can’t read these papers before 7 o’clock tomorrow morning. Stay of execution is granted.’ ”

In 1988, after the lawyers involved the news media the brothers were allowed to plead guilty to murder in exchange for their release. Their plea meant that charges could not be brought against the killer, despite the fact, Piel wrote, that “there was ample evidence to convict him.”

Eleanor Virden Jackson was born on Sept. 22, 1920, in Santa Monica. Her father, Louis, a doctor, was a Lithuanian Jew. (The original family name was Koussevitzky — conductor Serge Koussevitzky was a cousin — which, upon arriving in the United States, Louis changed to Jackson, the most American surname he could conceive.) Her mother, Millicent (Virden) Jackson, was a pianist.

After studying at UCLA, she transferred to Berkeley, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in 1940. Applying to Berkeley’s law school, she was denied admission: The dean who interviewed her, she recalled long afterward, informed her that “females always had nervous breakdowns.”

She did a year of law school at the University of Southern California before transferring to Berkeley. She earned her law degree there in 1943, the only woman in her class.

In 1955, she married Gerard Piel, the publisher of Scientific American magazine and a scion of the family that brewed Piels beer. She joined him in New York.

Piel’s husband died in 2004. In addition to Womack, she is survived by a stepson, Jonathan Piel; nine grandchildren; two stepgrandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and two step-greatgrandchildren.

Ozier Muhammad/New York Times 1999 Eleanor Jackson Piel practiced law until she was in her early 90s, starting when there were few women in the profession.