LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) - Toney Redman has started his last first job, trading the suit and tie he wore in court for an apron and the hammer he wields before the forge.
The Lincoln-based criminal defense attorney of 42 years literally tied his best tie on a flagpole outside the courthouse on March 4, the last day of his last case.
“Redman. 3/4/15. 42 yrs,” he wrote on the tie. “Adios.”
Over the years, Redman represented accused murderers, rapists, drunken drivers and batterers. He defended one of the six people wrongly accused and convicted of killing a Beatrice woman.
But it stopped being fun.
So at 69, Redman dropped law for art, working in his shop out on 24 acres in rural Lancaster County.
“It beats the hell out of being a lawyer,” he said before pounding on glowing steel one afternoon.
Of course there were fun days at the courthouse, he said. Few things were better than when a jury acquitted his client, he said.
“It’s you and the defendant against society,” he said.
So he’ll miss the weird, fascinating and sometimes tragic stories and circumstances behind the cases, the Lincoln Journal Star (https://bit.ly/1B8aTyB ) reports.
But losses and sentencings were difficult, Redman said, and the courtroom had become less collegial and more adversarial in recent years.
He’ll never forget what he calls one of his most “damning” cases.
In 1989, a jury convicted Joseph White of first-degree murder for the 1985 death of 68-year-old Helen Wilson of Beatrice.
White was one of six defendants and the only one who went to trial on the charges. Several of the others testified against him in court, and all pleaded to charges in Wilson’s death.
Nineteen years later, DNA evidence exonerated all six.
The case, Redman said, taught him that he could get a sense for whether a client was guilty — but only a sense.
“In the end,” he said, “you don’t know.”
Faced with what he thought were the horrendous facts of the case, Redman thought White was guilty and his conviction was a given.
“Nobody can fault what Toney did,” said John Stevens Berry Sr., who also represented a defendant in the case. “That whole case was a disaster to the entire system of justice in Nebraska.”
Berry described Redman as kind and empathetic and a powerful courtroom adversary as tough as any on cross-examination.
But Redman knew how to win a case without destroying the dignity of the person on the stand, Berry said.
Redman grew up in Iowa and Nebraska, and went to the University of Nebraska College of Law after enlisting in the Army near the end of the Vietnam War. He was stationed with an artillery unit and said he didn’t see the horrors those in the infantry did.
But the experience shaped his perspective.
“No matter what the situation is, once you’ve been in Vietnam, everything else is great,” Redman said.
After passing the bar, he went into private practice and also worked for the Lancaster County Public Defender’s Office for several years.
Redman said he started out wanting to do real estate law but took to criminal defense.
While some of his clients deserved prison, about 90 percent of them broke the law while they were drunk or high and didn’t need to be incarcerated, he said.
“Many, many of the people in prison do not belong in prison,” Redman said. “They belong in treatment.”
Redman said he’s encouraged that lawmakers are finally recognizing that.
He also hopes the state does away with mandatory minimum sentences. They’re among the reasons he stopped taking federal court cases about 10 years, he said.
Nebraska judges aren’t soft on crime, Redman said.
“Judges know the facts,” he said.
Redman travels to Santa Fe several times a year, delivering his work to a gallery there. On his most recent trip, he was joined by his son, an assistant district attorney in the Denver area.
The now-retired criminal defense attorney said he knows he doesn’t yet understand art, and he never thought he’d be an artist.
But it turns out that sculpting metal works the creative half of his brain, which wasn’t on the clock when his legal mind was.
And that kind of sculpture proved more fun than building wooden furniture, his previous hobby.
So he keeps at it — bending, texturizing steel, drawing color out of copper on pieces he sells in galleries in Lincoln and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“I will never wear a tie again if I can help it,” he said.
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Information from: Lincoln Journal Star, https://www.journalstar.com
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