"I went for him as hard as I could," Bryant said, squaring his shoulders. "I didn't like him, and I didn't like what he did to that girl."
So the young prosecutor sought the death penalty, an option then for first-degree murder and rape. He left the courtroom after closing arguments "feeling pretty good about my case" and awaited the jury's verdict in his third-floor court office. But when a marshal later called out, "Bryant, jury's back," the judge said, "I broke out in a sweat."
D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, above, hopes that a new annex to the U.S. courthouse in Washington will be named after William Bryant, the nation's first black chief judge on a federal bench.
(James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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He peeked anxiously into the court, saw the jury foreman mouth only the word "guilty." Bryant learned seconds later that the jurors had spared the man's life.
"I was so relieved," he said. "When you're young, you don't know anything. . . . Now I think, murder is murder, no matter who is doing it."
He left the prosecutor's office in 1954 and returned to criminal defense with fellow classmate William Gardner in an F Street law office later bulldozed for the MCI Center. They were partners in Houston, Bryant and Gardner, a legendarily powerful African American firm. Ten judges would eventually come from its ranks.
In those days, Bryant chuckled, he didn't feel so powerful. Judges who remembered his prosecution work kept appointing him to represent defendants who had no money. That was before the 1963 Supreme Court's Gideon decision requiring that indigent defendants be represented by a lawyer -- at public expense, if necessary.
"The judge would say, 'Mr. So and So, you say you don't have any money to hire an attorney?" Bryant recalled. " 'Well, then, the court appoints Mr. Bryant to represent you.' "
Some paid $25 or $50. Some paid nothing.
"There were weeks we paid the help and split the little bit left over for our groceries," he said.
Bill Schultz, Bryant's former law clerk, said Bryant took the cases "out of this sense of obligation to the court and legal system. He was very aware of discrimination, and he always fought for the criminal defendants."
At the time, blacks were barred from the D.C. Bar Association and its law library. Bryant went in anyway, and the black librarian let him.
One of his pro bono clients was Andrew Roosevelt Mallory, a 19-year-old who confessed to a rape after an eight-hour interrogation in a police station. Mallory was convicted and sent to death row. Defending Mallory's rights, a case Bryant took all the way to the Supreme Court in 1957, made him both nervous and famous.
He said he fretted constantly about his client facing the electric chair during the two years the case dragged on. "You talk about worried," he said. "It's something I can't forget."
But the Supreme Court agreed with Bryant that a man accused of a crime is entitled to be taken promptly before a magistrate to hear the charges against him. The court overturned Mallory's conviction and handed down a landmark decision on defendants' rights.
