Saul Goodman - Don't Go to Jail! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Keeping the Cuffs Off

He was recaptured pretty quickly and continued representing himself. Here’s the crazier part: the case was going Ted’s way . He had a legal adviser, but Ted was actually pretty sharp in the courtroom. He was knocking down weak evidence and motions from the prosecution right and left.

Psychopaths, though—they’ve always got to go down the psycho path. Ted went on a diet, managed to saw a small hole in the ceiling of his cell that he could get through with his thinned-down form, and escaped again.

This time he stayed gone for a little while. He zigged and zagged and ended up in Florida, calling himself Chris Hagen. Eventually, Ted lost what control he had and started killing again. But of course it wasn’t any of the several murders and assaults he committed in the Sunshine State that tripped him up—it was that he was driving a stolen car.

As I like to warn people, it’s always the little details that bite you in the ass.

Florida put Bundy on trial for murder, and it was a big show. Broadcast on TV, press from all over. And Ted had not just one, but five court-appointed lawyers at his disposal. So of course he chose once again to act in his own defense.

Ted and his advisers hammered out a plea deal with the prosecution. A plea deal in Florida, a state that’s always had a real affection for putting folks in Old Sparky. He’d have to cop to the murders he’d committed, and for that he’d get seventy-five years. Seventy-five years in prison is no picnic, but he’d be alive.

He couldn’t handle the fact he’d have to admit he’d savagely murdered innocent young women, though, so he went to trial.

This was Ted’s first Florida trial, and he lost. But you know, he did make an impression on the judge, who said, “You’d have made a good lawyer. I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went the wrong way, partner.”

Ted kept going the wrong way. He defended himself in his next trial, too. Of course he lost, but let’s give him credit for one clever legal move: he managed to marry his girlfriend while questioning her in open court, using a little known Florida statute that says if someone declares they are married in front of a judge, well, they are.

Bundy was executed in the late 1980s.

I have to give him credit—the guy took to the law like chloroform takes to a rag, and he pulled off a legit wedding ceremony quicker than I can Google “hubristophilia.”

After talking about something as heavy-duty as Ted Bundy’s courtroom antics, I should probably lighten things up. I admit: there are some fascinating, if not necessarily fun stories of pro se litigants out there—people who went up against the system without much in the way of legal equipment and nailed it, knocked it out of the damn park. Especially in some civil court cases.

Larry Flynt comes to mind. The wheelchair-bound publisher of Hustler (also known as the glossy-paged erotica most likely to be found in that special spot under a growing boy’s mattress), represented himself in court on a few occasions. He even tried to defend himself in front of the Supreme Court, but the highest court in the land wasn’t having any of the porn king’s crap. They appointed an attorney to address the court on Flynt’s behalf. Flynt was so angry about that he acted up in court, yelling, “Fuck this court! You denied me the counsel of my choice.” He said the justices were “eight assholes and a token [very impolite word that starts with a “c” and was directed at Justice Sandra Day O’Connor].” Larry Flynt: gifted pornographer, truly gifted demonstrator of contempt for the court.

As bountiful as the tales of a filthy-mouthed porn king may be (and they be aplenty), inventor Robert Kearns takes the pro se story cake. Who the hell was he, you ask? Lean in, enjoy…

If you’re driving along and it starts drizzling, your windshield gets hard to see through. If you run wipers full tilt, they do the job too well, right? They squeak until your teeth grind. One night, Robert Kearns was driving and it occurred to him that windshield wipers needed some kind of middle gear. He went home and invented the intermittent wiper you’re probably still using on your vehicle today.

Kearns knew he was onto something and brought what he’d made to some big automakers. Nobody bit at the time, but in a few years, the same car companies had somehow magically added their own intermittent settings to their products’ wipers. Go figure!

Kearns patented his invention in 1964. In the late 1970s, he realized he needed to bring suit against Ford Motors for infringing on his patent—they were using his invention and he wasn’t seeing a profit! Guess what? Kearns won his suit. He won big, in fact—10 million bucks. But it wasn’t easy. Kearns’s case against Ford was his life. His fight with the big monolith that old Hank built went on through the 1980s. He had a nervous breakdown; his marriage broke apart. Eventually, he actually wore the company down. They got tired and offered him millions in compensation.

But he turned it down, and fought some more. It finally took a federal jury to put the kibosh on the guy’s fight with Ford—the federal jury declared Kearns should get the $10 million. He then decided it was time for Chrysler to feel his wrath.

He faced Chrysler with a crew of lawyers, and they managed to persuade another federal jury that this genius’s patent had been infringed. The case turned to the damages phase and that was when Kearns told his attorneys to get lost and took over himself.

Once again, he was like a pro se savant—he convinced the jury to award him $20 million in damages. Chrysler wisely appealed the case to the Supreme Court, but the highest court in the land didn’t really satisfy anyone: the justices said Kearns should get his damages, but Chrysler couldn’t be prevented from using intermittent wipers.

The Amazing Mr. Kearns wasn’t done, believe it or not. He decided it was time to take on GM, as well as automakers from Europe to Japan.

That was when Kearns finally discovered his limits. He’d kicked plenty of ass, relentlessly so, but the amount of work was too much for one guy. Courts mostly dismissed his cases after that. In some ways, his mission—and this guy was on a mission—had finally overwhelmed him. I gotta hand it to him; for the right to be recognized as the dude who invented a middle wiper setting, he really maxed out the phrase “going the distance.” Well done, Kearnsy. Well done.

And for all the tap dancing I’m doing to celebrate my line of work and encourage you not to go mano y gavel with the courts by yourself, I have to admit that it’s still great that we all live in a land built to let us go it alone if we have to. Just remember the example of Robert Kearns. I admit, he had advantages: he was a brilliant guy, had a great education, even had experience working in military intelligence—but you don’t need to have any of these things if you understand that handling your own case requires one thing above all: hours upon hours of bona fide home-grown elbow grease.

I won’t say you’ll win your case if you put that kind of sweat equity into it, but it will damn sure help.

Still with me?

We’ve taken a good, hard look at different sides of the question, “Should I be my own attorney?” Hopefully by now you’re ready to call your own personal Saul.

Next, we’ll tackle some common situations that can require counsel. If the next part of our extended little chat—aren’t you glad I waived my usual fees for this?—does what I intend, it will ease the road through the legal system not only for you, but for your attorney, too.