Danny Fulgencio
Steven Phillips is suing his attorney, Kevin Glasheen, over legal fees.
Steven Phillips was about to boil over. This, the attorneys in the room must have known, wasn't good for anyone.
Danny Fulgencio
Exonerated prisoners like Steven Phillips have been paid millions by the state. But no one's made more than their lawyers.
Danny Fulgencio
Jeff Blackburn, the Innocence Project of Texas' chief legal counsel, has come under fire for fees he took from exonerated prisoners.
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At 51, Phillips had a delicate drawl, but the rest of him was all rangy wildcat sinew. He was a bit of a genetic oddity. He didn't lift weights, yet his neck was thick, tapered upward from a large pair of muscles that sat like small hillocks on his shoulders. He was a native Texan, born in Abilene, but he'd grown up in the Arkansas Ozarks and had, until just recently, handled himself just fine for 25 years in a couple of Texas prisons, including the Coffield Unit, populated by violent felons.
Now, here he was, in January 2010, in a Dallas skyscraper getting prodded about his marginal history as a sex addict and a peeping Tom. Phillips wasn't denying any of that. He knew he'd come a long way since his parole got revoked in '97, when he scaled a woman's balcony and peered through her window. But those turbulent nights lay in the distant past. He worked at keeping it that way every single day, adhering to a rigid 12-step program. "Every man is responsible for working out his own salvation," Phillips liked to say.
As far as he was concerned, this lawyer was just flinging mud. He thought he was there to get grilled about a lawsuit he'd filed against a guy named Jeff Blackburn, a famed Amarillo defense attorney known for his work with the Innocence Project of Texas, and against Kevin Glasheen, a top-gun personal-injury lawyer from Lubbock, who was in the room at this very moment, monitoring the deposition. What did any of this have to do with his case?
Phillips' suit was over the $1 million and change he'd been charged by Glasheen. Their partnership, he says, began as a plan to file a lawsuit against the city of Dallas, whose police force decades before had made the arrest that sent Phillips away. The lawsuit never got filed, but in the spring of 2009, not long after Phillips hired Glasheen, Texas lawmakers passed a bill more than tripling the amount of money the state pays the wrongfully convicted. The law had been championed by Glasheen and Blackburn. According to Glasheen, that championing was part of their work as Phillips' lawyers. But after the law passed, Phillips fired Glasheen and filed the compensation papers with the state himself. Now he wanted a judge to void that contract and block Glasheen from collecting 25 percent on the $4 million coming Phillips' way.
Blackburn's attorney, Vince Nowak, was a testy bulldog, and he took the suit against his client and friend personally. He handed Phillips a book about sex addiction, in which Phillips had anonymously authored a chapter.
"Will you tell me what the title of Exhibit No. 4 is?" Nowak asked.
"Shut it down," one of Phillips' lawyers, Tom McKenzie, said.
But Nowak kept pushing buttons, and McKenzie kept pushing back. Phillips was a keening kettle now, and he'd had enough.
"Shut your bitch-ass up," Phillips swore at Nowak.
"Hey, hey, hey!" another of Phillips' lawyers cautioned.
Nowak didn't seem to hear him. He continued to argue with McKenzie.
"Fixin' to take your ass outside, dude, if you keep that up," Phillips warned.
Nowak heard him this time.
"Well, do you want to take my ass outside right now?" Nowak asked.
"Absolutely."
Phillips' attorneys attempted to defuse him.
"Steven."
"Steven."
"Take a break," Nowak said, dismissively. "Take a bathroom break."
"Shut your bitch-ass up, dude," Phillips muttered as he made his way toward the door, which put Nowak directly in the path of a pissed-off prison-hardened man.
"Call 911! I'm not joking," Nowak said. "Your witness just threatened me. Keep it on the record. You heard that."
It had all soured so quickly. Not just this deposition, but the whole case, the whole conversation about compensating innocent prisoners, about how much is owed to them when the legal system gets it wrong. This was only the latest dust-up in a knock-down brawl within the Texas exoneree and legal communities over the glut of cash loosed by the state comptroller following the passage of that bill. What should have been a great victory for Glasheen and Blackburn on behalf of Texas' exonerees — due in no small part to some inventive, outside-of-the-box advocacy — was now worn like a pair of scarlet letters signifying greed and suspicion. A pall was cast over the Innocence Project of Texas for its connection to these lawyers, who some now believed saw newly exonerated men as walking, talking paychecks.
Meanwhile, a big piece of the pie that should have eased Steven Phillips' life was destined for the pockets of attorneys, who in turn were fighting to keep the money from other attorneys. It was the sort of unhappy ending few foresaw during the heady days when Texas' compensation scheme went from criminally stingy to stand-out generous.
As Phillips strode to the bathroom to cool off, McKenzie tried to calm down Nowak. "Listen," he began.
"I don't give a shit if he did 26 years," Nowak broke in. "He called my client a liar, Mr. McKenzie. I'm asking him what lies my client told. I think that's a fair question."
