They enforced a social order that separated blacks and whites, says Thompson, the UM professor.
I think it was a black man. August, Paille and Senak were charged with conspiracy to do an unlawful act in an unlawful fashion. I would try and do one two jury trials a week, felony juror trials. So, now we’ve got Hollywood – very strange. I'm soulless!" I’ve got evidence of white girls being in the motel with them. So he chose Mason, Michigan to try the case. "Get answers to your questions, daily updates and easy access to the resources you need, delivered every evening to your inbox. How am I going to beat a case where he a) lied to the homicide bureau in the first place, and b) he threw down the knife? He made a mistake, in my opinion; he should have waited. I objected for the record, scared to death, because I thought maybe they would convict him of manslaughter, but in the end obviously it helped me, because if they didn’t find premeditation and malice, then they had to find him not guilty, which they did.
Avery Weiswasser asked the judge for permission to fire the starter pistol in the courtroom in front of the jury. He appealed to Schemanske, Cahalan did, and then he tried to charge them with conspiracy.NL: I know August was bound over for trial for murder. That’s why I took the judgeship when Blanchard offered it to me, because I wanted to change my image. All the others – robbery, breaking and entering, drugs, anything – we would see the file at 8:30, 9:00 in the morning and bingo we were off and running, selecting the jury and trying the case. I hadn’t tried a criminal case in 25 years. My client was escorted to the Ingham Country border by the Ingham County Sheriff’s Department. William John Beer was an Oakland County Circuit judge. What was it like having this massive headline-garnering case at 30?NL: I wasn’t walking around with my chest out, I can tell you that. Prosecutors persuaded Beer to allow them to fire a starter's pistol in the courtroom. So that was a blunder. NPR's Michel Martin discusses the case with Lippitt. The police had 4,300 officers — fewer than 250 of them black, says Willie Bell, who joined the force in 1971 and is now chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners. The trial is going to be a postscript. Back then, Lippitt looked like "Godfather"-era Al Pacino, in his Ralph Lauren suits, perfect hair and sideburns. Now the important part of that case …am I talking too much?NL: The two most significant things about that case were these: first, Avery Weiswasser really messed up. None were convicted. I don't like being irrelevant," Lippitt says. View Slideshow 2 of 3. "Norman Lippitt and the police acquittals absolutely had a major impact on race relations both in the 1970s and today," says McGuire, the Wayne State professor. Football took him to the University of Detroit. Some were beaten with the butts of guns while called racial epithets. Who was the magistrate, do you remember?NL: Paille was also charged with murder, but I was successful in getting his case dismissed at the preliminary. They offered him a manslaughter. He was also a very important Lansing lawyer. Another teen, Aubrey Pollard, 19, was led into a second room, apparently as part of the game. "If he is bothered, Lippitt isn't tipping his hand. He graduated Detroit College of Law Magna Cum Laude in 1979 and stayed on with the Lippitt law firm until 1983 when John took over the practice entirely. I don't think so.
So anyway, William John Beer gets assigned to the case. "Rather than hearing what the community was saying — that the police were operating like a renegade army — they kept doubling down with brutality," says Thompson, who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a book she wrote about the 1971 Attica Prison riot.That was the atmosphere leading to the night of July 23, 1967, when police raided a black-owned, after-hours speakeasy on 12th Street and Clairmount. By the late 1970s, he says he was billing $250,000 per year, the equivalent of $1 million, representing police. Norman Lippitt… Simple as that.WW: After you completed law school, did you want to stay in the area or was it just by default that you did?NL: Well, actually that’s a good question. Simpson had one. The union paid for it, but never interfered in the defense strategy, never told me what to do, suggested what I should do or not do. Police were on edge because, earlier in the day, a revered fellow officer, Jerome Olshove, had been shot and killed during a scuffle with looters.City police, state troopers and National Guardsmen arrived at the motel. https://detroit1967.detroithistorical.org/items/show/440 Norman Lippitt puts his feet up in his Birmingham, Mich., office. So I took it on and won the case and that’s how I came to work for the DPOA. They were terrible. I knew I wasn’t qualified for medicine or dentistry. I don’t remember exactly the timing.
"Norman Lippitt hasn't passed a lot of mirrors without stopping to say hi," says Al Grant of the Retired Detroit Police Officers Association, who started with the force in 1970.Boxes of news clips saved by Lippitt's mother include fashion spreads for which he posed in The Detroit News Sunday Magazine. "Let me turn it around for you, OK? There was a social movement that was very complicated and far greater than Norman," Harrison says. William John Beer wants to try the case in a historical courtroom. Some people thought I was a good guy, some guys thought I was a bad guy, and I always tried to emphasize that DPOA was a good client and they paid me $50 an hour at the time for all my work and General Motors hadn’t hired me. I never got involved with them in that way. Sometimes, he helped police with phrases, such as "Fearing for my life ...," Lippitt acknowledges.Then-state Sen. Coleman A. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am in Birmingham, Michigan.