Penny: Champion of the Marginalized

[ Upbeat music plays ] The only time I ever played golf before I retired was in 1972, and I got a telephone call from my friend the lawyer, Sarita Waite.

The Alameda County Clerk's golf tournament was coming up, and she really wanted to play in it.

And she'd gone down to the clerk's office to register for it, and they refused her registration 'cause she was a woman.

She had decided she was gonna file a lawsuit and asked me if I would attach my name, and I said, "Of course I will."

But of course that meant I had to play golf.

So, I went out, and I took one lesson.

Well, the newspapers reported that Penny Cooper had shot the highest score ever on the golf course, with the headline, "Women Teed Off So Are the Men."

[ Chuckles ] You judge a society by how it treats its worst, and constitutional rights are meaningless unless they apply to the worst in society.

I really wanted to be a trial lawyer, and I wanted to fight for the people, and I wanted to fight for their -- the causes.

I have to say, from the first day that I walked into the Public Defender's Office as an employee, I really thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

Everybody was just fabulous.

I loved the excitement of figuring out people's problems, going to court.

She was really feisty, and the clients loved her.

At that time, there were 12 lawyers in the Public Defender's Office in Alameda County -- covered the whole county.

So we learned how to try cases.

[ Psychedelic rock music plays ] One of the most memorable cases I had was sort of a tale of the times.

There was a man in Berkeley who was charged with possessing LSD, and he announced to the whole community that he was going to be, on a certain day and a certain time and place, carrying LSD in his cross on his neck.

And of course he did that, and he was promptly arrested.

And I was assigned his case.

During the trial, the prosecutor asked why he was carrying this LSD in his cross, and "Charlie Brown" Ortman said, "Well, I heard voices."

And Stacey Walthall said to him, "You hear voices?

Are you hearing voices now?"

And I yelled out, "Objection!

Hearsay!"

And that was just a huge hoot, you know, made the papers, softened the judge, and he just got a tongue-lashing.

[ Soft music plays ] I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and I became very much aware of the fact that I was Jewish because I was singled out for it.

Myself and the only other Jewish kid in the class, we were sort of segregated.

All the other kids sat alphabetically but myself and my friend.

We sat at the back.

I did go to religious school, which required me to get from school onto a yellow school bus with Hebrew letters on the side every Wednesday afternoon.

And everybody would see us on this weird bus that had these Hebrew letters.

My father was born in Poland and came over to the United States when he was about six, with his family.

They were extremely poor.

His father basically sold rags from a horse cart.

My mother's father was a tailor, and he had a tailor shop in Downtown Denver.

My dad did not have a high-school education, and neither of my parents had a college education.

They were of the era that believed that everything they did should be for their children.

My dad decided, when he was in his mid 30s, to enlist in World War II.

And the reason he did that, even though he had two children at the time, was he felt like the Jews weren't doing enough for the World War II effort.

And he lost his leg.

The amputees were awarded the first Hydra-Matic Oldsmobile car so they could drive a car without having to shift gears and use the clutch.

And that was a big highlight in our neighborhood, our little blue Hydra-Matic Oldsmobile.

I got a scholarship to the University of Colorado because my parents really couldn't afford an out-of-state college.

And I had always loved San Francisco and the Bay Area because my aunt and uncle lived here and this is where we would go on vacations.

It was always that bright spot at the end of the road, and I just thought this was the greatest place in the world.

Following graduation, I came out to Berkeley to go to law school.

I was at Boalt from '61 to '64.

The school was headed by Dean William Prosser, who had written the key textbook on torts, and he was nationally famous.

And he didn't believe that women should be in a law school at all.

He would just make fun of women in the class.

So he announced very early on that he was going to treat the men and women equally, and in my section, there were like 85 men and 3 women, and he said, "I'm just gonna call on you, 'man, woman, man, woman,'" and that's how he did it.

And then he would say, "Stand up like a man and answer the question."

It's hard to be a criminal-defense lawyer.

Really, everybody's against you.

And you have to have a certain resilience and, I believe, a certain sense of humor in order to be successful.

I was in court, and the opposing district attorney was somebody who had been in my law-school class.

And while I was arguing a point in front of the judge, he yelled out to the judge, "Don't mind her, Judge.

She's on the rag."

And I just was really...floored and said, "First of all, Judge, it's not true.

And secondly, he should be held in contempt for this."

And the judge just brushed it off.

[ Chanting ] Hell no!

We won't go!

The anti-war movement was rampant all around the Bay Area, everywhere else, too.

And about seven or eight of us, at least, decided to march in an anti-war parade in San Francisco.

John Nunes, who was the public defender, called the group of us into the office.

I remember his quote.

"I'll take steps," meaning he was gonna try to fire us.

For exercising our civil rights, which is what we were in business for!

And from that point on, the jobs that I was given were less than desirable.

I had been dating Jim Newhouse.

We were very close, and we were both very much aligned on this issue.

And we had sort of made tentative plans that we would go out on our own eventually.

We opened our private practice in March of 1969.

Two weeks later, "People's Park" hit.

[ Sirens wailing, indistinct shouting ] So Jim and I went to this church where all of the "People's Park" defendants had gathered.

And we basically told these people that, if they wanted to hire us, we would do their cases for $100.

And the firms in San Francisco were charging $1,500.

So we got about a hundred clients our first month.

We were always able to get the charges down to something reasonable so that their futures weren't affected.

We would come to court on Monday mornings to discuss cases, and we would go into chambers, and everybody would be talking about the football games -- every single guy.

And I felt I was really at a disadvantage not knowing about football, so I talked to Jim about it, and we got season tickets to the Oakland Raiders so that I could talk football.

And then I learned baseball and all of it, and now I actually enjoy watching it all the time, and I talk baseball, football, basketball with all the guys.

Eventually, Jim got a girlfriend, and I got a girlfriend, too.

And I had finally come out.

And we continued to practice together, but eventually, his interest was more where his girlfriend was, which was in the southern part of the county and in Carmel.

And my interest was in making a big career here in the East Bay.

Her mother adored her, and I think she probably had a very strong foundation, and she became a very confident person early on.

Never bothered her a whit to go wherever you had to go, and she'd just...go.

She goes to Puerto Rico, goes into court, and everybody's talking Spanish.

And she -- "Wait a second.

I thought this was a U.S. Federal District Court?"

So she calls the associate counselor and says, "You better get your ass into chambers here 'cause these people are talking Spanish and I don't know what they're talking about."

The judge said to me, "And, Ms. Cooper, the next time you return to my courtroom, you will wear a dress."

And so I did.

And I stood in front of the judge who pronounced the judgment upon my client of a year in jail.

I said, "But, Judge, I wore a dress for you."

And he looked down, and he saw the dress, and he said, "That's right, Ms. Cooper," banged his hand down, and said, "That'll be six months."

The last time I wore a dress in the courtroom.

[ Soft music plays ] It just was a natural sort of evolution for me, realizing that I was really more attracted and much more companionable with a woman.

Coming out to my close friends was difficult, and one of the women who was a part of this group was just absolutely horrified.

And she just said, "Oh, my God.

I just feel so sorry for you, Penny.

I feel so sorry for you.

I think your problem is you just haven't met the right guy yet."

And I really enjoy this story because right now she's on her fifth husband, so apparently she hasn't met the right guy either.

I met Penny because we had this mutual friend who thought we would like each other 'cause we were the only two people she knew that were both interested in contemporary Italian design.

And we realized that our common interest in contemporary art was one of the ties that bound us.

And we were becoming really consumed by it, so we would read magazines, we would go to museums, and we would go to exhibits.

And we decided that it would be important to support women artists.

We've been together 36 years.

We chose to get married the first day that it was officially legal in the state of California.

Our collection is a mix of what you would call emerging artists, mid-career artists, and many artists who've reached heights of any artist's career.

Our collecting would be circumscribed by how well I had done that year 'cause often I waited till the end of the year to see if we had any money that we could spare, and whatever we had, we used to buy art with.

My role with Penny has really shifted a lot over the years.

When she was working, you know, a million hours a week, I would take care of a lot of the things around the house.

I would usually go to court in the morning.

And then, at noon, I would show up in the office, wait for clients, and handle all those matters, and then back in the office after afternoon court and normally in the office till 7:00 or 8:00.

I worked most weekends.

I worked lots of nights all the time because I had a lot of work and I was really interested in being over-prepared.

I'd really never been with anybody that had worked such long hours, and it gave me a lot of time to be by myself, which I love.

Rena is a published poet, and there was never enough time for Rena to be able to write.

No matter how hard or long Penny worked, she loved to sit down and have a really nice dinner, and we'd talk about the day.

And I loved her energy.

I had been asked to represent the great ceramic artist Peter Voulkos, who had some issues with drugs.

In lieu of paying a fee, I asked him to give me a piece of his work which I thought was really beautiful, called a "stack."

It was a huge ceramic piece.

After I had the piece for a few years, I decided that it didn't fit in our collection because it wasn't a piece by a woman, and I also became aware of the fact that the Berkeley Art Museum did not own a piece of this incredible artist's work.

So I donated the piece to the Berkeley Art Museum, and soon after that, I was invited to be on the board.

Back in 1994, I wanted to do an exhibition that was potentially controversial on the theme of the resonance of gay and lesbian experience in 20th-century American culture.

There had been very little occasion for museums in America to look at this particular theme.

You know, who's gonna put their money behind an exhibition like this?

And spontaneously, Penny Cooper said, "If you can't raise the money from other sources, I will underwrite this exhibition."

And I just remember feeling so relieved and so grateful and thinking, "This is precisely how trustees should behave."

You always want to be with Penny because she's just gonna help you get through.

[ Folk music plays ] There's nothing I like better than seeing art with Penny.

I've always really loved contemporary art.

I love contemporary artists.

I love their thoughts.

I love the way they approach issues.

I love the way they translate what they think onto whatever their surface might be.

Artist's way of thinking is really almost completely opposite from the way that I learned to think.

[ Up-tempo symphony plays ] I had been at the Federal Public Defender's Office for two years, and I was gonna go out somewhere, and I thought I was gonna go with this very well-respected criminal-law firm.

She said, "Come on over to my house for dinner," and we did a lot of talking and laughing and hanging out.

And at the end of it, she said, "You shouldn't go with those guys.

You should come with me.

Come with my firm, and in a year, I'll make you a partner."

There is a 15-year age difference, and that made it really good for me also because I really had an intense desire to pass on what I knew could happen in the courtroom.

So, I didn't do any cases or anything else.

I just went where Penny went for a month.

Wherever we went, everybody would brighten up because Penny came.

Because she'd be talking about sports or telling a story about a client or remembering something funny that happened, and in the meantime, she was getting what she wanted.

And she could, in an instant, get tough.

She would often say, you know, "The prosecutor, I mean, he's lying through his teeth.

I mean, it's unbelievable what they're getting away with."

You know, so by the time I go to court with her, I've just got steam blowing out my ears.

And we march into court, and the next thing, I look around, and she's got her arm around the prosecutor.

You know, everybody else's blood pressure is up to 200.

[ Up-tempo drums beating ] [ Ethereal music plays ] I think of Penny as like a very friendly older sister to me or like an aunt that was very doting on me.

And yet, at the same time, I could never really turn my back to her, because she would slit my throat in a nanosecond if I didn't give her everything that she wanted.

The case was People v. Dan Mackay.

Dan Mackay was a nice guy, Mormon guy, who beat his wife to death with a baseball bat.

She was a very heavyset woman.

He loved her.

He loved her anyway she looked.

But she decided at one point in her life, in her early 40s, that she was too fat.

And she took these drugs, and according to her, it made her really want to have sex with young men.

They were just totally steeped in the Mormon religion, and this really began to drive him crazy.

She announced to my client that she was gonna take the kids.

They were in an upstairs bathroom.

The kids were all off at church in the morning.

And he found himself in a wild rage, looked in the closet.

He saw a bat, took a bat, and beat the hell out of her.

And then he took her body -- dead body -- and he wrapped it in a sleeping bag.

And he drops the body off, and then he pulls off to the side of the road, whereupon he's seen by a Highway Patrol officer, who sees blood coming down the rear bumper of the car.

So it was really irrational what he did, and it was really terrible.

She just says, "Look, this is what I'm gonna do.

This is how I'm gonna drive a truck through your case."

And she proceeds to do that.

And he confesses in a statement that's about two or three hours long, that would make anybody start sobbing.

My last name is Pinney -- P-I-N-N-E-Y.

So it's like Penny Cooper and Paul Pinney -- There's all these P's.

And we had all these lengthy, lengthy interviews with Dan Mackay that went on for literally hours.

And so I would excise portions of those and play those to the jury.

So in her closing argument, she would call me "Pick-and-Choose Pinney."

She said, "He's 'Pick-and-Choose Pinney.'

He doesn't show you the whole thing."

And I argued forcefully for first-degree murder.

As it was, the jury came back with a voluntary manslaughter.

She has good powers of persuasion.

[ Mid-tempo rock music plays ] We had a lot of clients who would be impressed if you looked good, if you had a nice new suit on, or if you drove a fancy car.

I remember being really, really super young, and I wasn't quite sure what she did for a living.

We got off the freeway to get gas in the middle of nowhere on our way up to the Oregon border, and there were probably 500 motorcyclists.

Turns out they were a bunch of Hells Angels.

They looked kind of mean, and I was terrified.

In typical Penny fashion, she gets out of her bright red Mercedes, looks over at about 20 of them, and says, "Hi, boys.

Thanks for my car."

Later she tells me that was the beginning of her great career, representing the Hells Angels, and they paid for her car.

It was a huge trial, and there was lots of publicity, and it kind of launched me into another space.

[ Rock music continues ] I had a name, Cooper, which didn't strike people at first as being necessarily Jewish.

And I can remember one time at a celebratory party after somebody had a victory in the Public Defender's Office, and one of the guys made some remark in fun jest about me being Jewish.

And the man who was the public defender of the county, just looked at me with the most astonished face and insisted and kept saying, "You're not Jewish.

You're not Jewish."

And the way he said that was he didn't want me to be Jewish.

So even at that stage of my life, it was, like, there.

And it did help me develop a certain resilience that I needed later, in terms of being an underdog often in the courtrooms.

[ Suspenseful music plays ] Michael Blatt, who was a wealthy developer in Stockton, had been accused of ordering the killing of a former business associate.

And the theory of the case was that he had ordered two ex-football players, that he knew because of his association with the UOP football team, to kill Larry Carnegie.

And in fact, one of them, James Mackey, did kill Larry Carnegie by firing a crossbow into him.

And the case was originally tried by two Alameda County lawyers.

It was a death-penalty case.

And these lawyers had the trial and the case for a couple of years.

Prosecutor was determined to retry it.

This case was tried by my partner, Cris Arguedas, and myself.

He was a big guy.

He had been a football player in college.

He was a Fundamentalist Christian.

He didn't like Penny and I. I'm sure he didn't like it that we were gay.

He didn't like it that we were criminal defense lawyers.

This was his life, this case, and his career, as it turns out.

Penny had read the trial transcript, and she saw that Blansett has a need to talk and be listened to all the time.

Penny decides that what we're gonna do is we're gonna not speak to him -- ever, for the whole trial.

And it drove him absolutely insane.

And during one point in the opening statement, Eual Blansett got so frustrated that he actually left the courtroom.

And went into the bathroom, which was right next door in this old courthouse, and would be flushing the toilet during her opening statement and then make a big show of, you know, coming through the doors like this, and, you know, just to be a distracting, obnoxious fool.

When he went, she stopped talking.

She waited for him to come back.

And so she made him be the fool.

He objected to every single thing, and it was really a battle, and when James Mackey went to testify, I actually cross-examined this gentleman for 20 days.

And the judge says to us, "If you -- Counsel, if you insult the opposing counsel one more time, I'm gonna hold you in contempt, and I'm gonna charge you $100 for every time I hold you in contempt."

She reaches into her pocket, she takes out the wad, and she counts out 5 $100 bills, and she says, "Here's for this one, and here's for four more!"

Towards the end, Cris was in a hallway talking to a witness.

He says to me, "Move out of here.

I'm talking to my witness here."

And I say, "I'm not moving.

I'm talking to my witness here.

It's a hallway."

And he says, "I said move."

And I said, "I'm not moving."

He kind of picks me up like an inch off the floor and is kind of walking me back like to move me out of the way.

And Cris fell onto the floor in the sight of some of the jurors.

10 months later, the jury hung 11-1 for acquittal.

And the case was ultimately dismissed, and Mr. Blansett lost his job.

This article features the unbelievable battle we had, entitled "Culture Clash."

And that it was.

[ Upbeat music plays ] One of the very great moments in not only my legal life but my life itself was being able to argue for the defense in the Unites States Supreme Court.

It was a very complicated matter involving a probation search that produced a large drug lab.

The problem was that the defendant had never consented to being on probation.

Court crier comes out.

Then the court members come out.

They sit, and the solicitor general gets up to begin his argument, and I am terrified.

The Honorable Thurgood Marshall bellows into the microphone at my opponent, "When did the respondent here first know of this probation business?"

The answer -- "He was told at the door."

The justice -- "That don't give you any problems, do it?"

The man's answer here -- "No."

The justice -- "Oh, so he lost all his rights without even knowing he lost them?"

[ Laughter ] And then the justice groaned uncontrollably, and I was feeling quite calm.

It's not just the drama of going to court and objecting and winning or losing.

It's really managing people's lives when they get into difficulty or trouble.

A lot of people are critical at what you do until they need you.

And when they need you, their whole attitude about it is totally different.

People don't get guilty people off.

What you do is ease a situation and try to reach compromises in most cases that are meaningful for both sides.

I've received hundreds of letters from jail from desperate people.

I read them all, I usually respond, and occasionally, I take the case.

My favorite letter of all, written many, many years ago by a prisoner -- At end of his letter, he's saying, "Before closing, I'd like to tell you something about yourself."

[ Laughter ] "If there is such a thing here in our society, prison, your name is a household word.

Everyone from the Bay Area has been represented by you at one time in the past."

[ Laughter ] "You have many faces.

Sometimes you are described as being about 50 and walk with a cane."

I was about 25 then.

[ Laughter ] "And at other times, you wear large hats and colorful clothes.

You drive everything from a Henry J to a Rolls-Royce.

Seemingly, the 'in thing' is to have known you through your profession at one time.

After all, without dreams and fantasies, what else have we here?"