Dennis Riordan, Bay Area attorney known for freeing the wrongfully imprisoned, dies at 73 & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

“Man, he cared about his cases,” said J. Anthony Kline, who recently retired as the state’s top appellate judge and observed Riordan in dozens of cases over 40 years.

Kline called Riordan the best criminal appellate attorney in the state — someone who blended passion, knowledge and a sense of humor into an “incredibly effective” legal method that kept judges and prosecutors on their toes and leveled the playing field for his incarcerated clients, many of whom were non-white and blue-collar.

“He was a happy warrior,” Kline said. “He loved what he did.”

Riordan’s biggest cases have Wikipedia pages and media-bestowed nicknames. In 1986, he won a long battle for Johnny Spain, a Black Panther convicted of murder and conspiracy in connection with the infamous 1971 San Quentin State Prison escape attempt and riot that left six dead; a judge ruled that because Spain had been chained in heavy shackles throughout his criminal proceedings, his right to a fair trial had been violated. In 2011, Riordan used new evidence, including DNA, to help free an Arkansas man from death row — Damien Echols, one of the “West Memphis Three,” accused by prosecutors of orchestrating a 1993 triple murder.

More recently, Riordan’s efforts were crucial in winning the exoneration of Hamid Hayat, a young Muslim man from Lodi who had been swept up in the country’s post-9/11 hysteria and falsely convicted on flimsy terrorism charges.

“He was the centerpiece of my life,” said Hayat, who kept in touch with Riordan after his 2019 release and visited the attorney at his Potrero Hill home last week. “I just thanked him for everything he did for me. I said, ‘You’re the fearless leader of our legal team. If you weren’t my appeals attorney, God knows, I might still be in prison.’”

Born into a Catholic family in the Bronx in 1948, the third of four children, Riordan received his law degree from New York University in 1974. He soon moved to San Francisco and went to work for a criminal defense attorney named Charles Garry.

At the time, Garry was representing Johnny Spain in his marathon trial. Riordan first met Spain while the defendant was in custody. They formed a lasting bond, and after Spain was convicted, Riordan got a job with the state public defender’s office and started working on Spain’s appeal there.

“Dennis’s approach to Johnny became his approach to all the cases,” said retired Golden Gate University School of Law professor Susan Rutberg, who met Riordan in 1975 as a young trial lawyer. “He really understood the humanity of the client and treated the client as his best friend, in custody.”

Riordan also understood the value of positive media coverage, cultivating relationships with reporters and sharing his clients’ stories with the press. Some at the public defender’s office thought it was a bit much, calling him “File a Brief, Call a Press Conference Riordan,” Rutberg said.

As Riordan once put it to The Chronicle, “I learned very, very early that the press is a wild horse to ride.”

By the time he went into private practice, setting up an office at a rambling Victorian in Hayes Valley, Riordan had married and was a new father. He often brought his daughter, Lisa, to the office — and sometimes to the prison visiting room.

“The first time I went to prison, I was still in diapers,” remembered Lisa Riordan Seville, now a 38-year-old investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker based in New York. Spain would do magic tricks to entertain her, she recalled, pulling quarters from behind her ears.

Though Riordan and Lisa’s mother divorced when she was 4, “He was a really involved dad,” she said. He liked to play basketball with Lisa and her friends, giving the kids 10 cents for every shot they drained. “He would always tell us to box out,” Lisa said, “so we were incredibly aggressive on defense.”

Years later, in 1988, when Spain was finally released, Lisa’s father brought her to greet Spain as he left the California Medical Facility in Vacaville; a photo of Spain holding young Lisa appeared in The Chronicle.

The Spain case — grueling, high-stakes, media-intense, legally intricate — set the mold for the rest of Riordan’s career. He built a reputation as the guy who would take on the hardest criminal appeals and stick with them the longest, even if he needed to work for free at first. He took cases that he found legally interesting, where he could develop a novel theory or strategy: “If you had a difficult problem, and you wanted the best lawyer, you’d go to Dennis,” said Charles Breyer, senior federal judge in the Northern District of California.

And he took cases that he believed in — ones where it seemed obvious that the legal system had screwed up, a person had been wrongfully convicted and there was some vital constitutional principle that would be vindicated by fixing the mistake.

In 2001, Riordan and his longtime law partner Donald Horgan represented Marjorie Knoller, the San Francisco woman charged with murder after her aggressive dog mauled and killed her neighbor. Knoller was “a person who was so reviled, it was a nuclear case,” Horgan remembered.

But the partners believed it was a case of involuntary manslaughter: The murder statute didn’t fit Knoller’s actions, and to stretch it would create a dangerous precedent.

“As unpopular as she was, Dennis thought she was being treated terribly unfairly under the law, and he was going to do something about it,” Horgan said. “It’s just so typically Dennis.” They ultimately lost the case.

“In the car with other people’s parents when I was a kid, they would always ask, ‘How can your dad defend murderers?’ ” Lisa remembered. “And I would say, ‘It’s about justice, it’s about the law.’ That was always important to him. It’s more than about that one person. It’s about the precedent that is set for all things carrying forward. That was something I understood very young.”

On the pages of his appellate briefs and in court hearings, Riordan developed a unique style of combat, both provocative and professorial. He had a way of challenging judges without ticking them off, Horgan said; in fact, they often welcomed it, because “they knew it was going to be both entertaining and completely elucidating.”

Martin Jenkins, a California Supreme Court justice who presided over some of Riordan’s cases in both state and federal court, described the attorney as “pretty much always the smartest person in the room, but never acted like it.”

“He’d get a wry smile on his face. A little twinkle in his eye. And he’d repackage the argument in a way that helped us achieve consensus,” Jenkins said. Outside of court, the two men ultimately became friends, closing down restaurants together or just grabbing a burger: “I came to know him as a person, as a man, and my admiration just grew exponentially,” Jenkins said.

Riordan enjoyed mentoring other lawyers, including Rutberg, who used to go running with him every morning in Golden Gate Park. “As we ran, he would give me good ideas for things to do in court,” Rutberg said. “And then I would go to court and do these things that Dennis had suggested.”

“What I didn’t understand was how radical his ideas were,” she added, “because he made everything sound so sensible.”

Many in the Bay Area legal world had no idea until recently that Riordan was sick. Diagnosed in 2015 with colon cancer that soon spread to his liver and lungs, he began treatment but continued to litigate and write hundred-page briefs. He told colleagues he couldn’t bear to step back from some of his cases, particularly the Hayat appeal, which had obsessed him for more than a decade.

“He said, ‘I have things I have to get done,’” Horgan recalled. “‘I have to get Hamid out of prison.’ And he did.”

Riordan’s health declined sharply in recent weeks. Although he outlived his Stage Four cancer prognosis by several years, “when it broke, it broke very quickly,” he told The Chronicle over the phone on Wednesday, the day before he died. His last court argument, he said, was for a murder appeal on June 24. Coughing intermittently, Riordan discussed the case with typical lucidity and passion: “Hopefully, that will be a final victory.”

He caught himself, and his voice turned playful for a moment. “Posthumous final victory,” he said.

Riordan mentioned that some of his longtime clients had recently gotten in touch to say their goodbyes, including Johnny Spain, now 73.

“He’s been out now since ’88,” Riordan said. “So, that’s 34 years that he never imagined. He never imagined he’d get to be 73.”

When Hayat came by to pay his respects earlier this week, the two men spoke briefly about their differing ideas of faith. Hayat is a devout Muslim; Riordan appreciated many religions but found it hard to believe in an all-loving divine structure.

“I told him, we all have our day,” Hayat recalled. “We have to leave this world. He said, ‘We’re all going to get there.’”

As Riordan dozed off, Hayat played a soft Islamic prayer on his phone. Riordan said he found it relaxing and peaceful.

It “means an awful lot” to know that he helped innocent people get their lives back, Riordan told the newspaper. “They all resonate.”

He spoke, too, about his pride in his daughter and her journalism, telling friends to watch “A Woman On the Outside,” a documentary film Lisa had recently completed about mass incarceration and its impacts on families. Though Riordan had only one child, “I got the one I wanted,” he said.

On Wednesday, Riordan was still answering notes from the dozens of lawyers, friends and clients who had learned of his illness and reached out with kind words. He considered, then rejected, the idea of issuing a press release about his own impending demise, instead calling this reporter to give him a head start on his obituary. He even emailed Horgan with argument ideas for an upcoming hearing in one of their cases.

“He was, until the very end, running the show,” Lisa wrote Thursday evening in an email to friends and family. “He died peacefully, as he wanted to — at home, with loved ones, having called Joc, his longtime (and endlessly patient) assistant, to ask one last time if the office mail had come in.”

The email included a final message from Riordan, dictated to Lisa:

“Dennis Riordan died today in the presence of his daughter, Lisa, and his sister, Bernadette, after a seven-year battle with cancer. May he rest in peace.”

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Bob Egelko contributed to this report.

Jason Fagone is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @jfagone

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