Luther West; Criticized Military Justice System

Luther Charles West, 82, a retired Army lawyer who became a critic of military justice and went on to a civil rights legal career in Baltimore, died Aug. 31 of pneumonia and complications from surgery at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis. He lived in Severna Park.

Mr. West, who retired in 1968 at the rank of lieutenant colonel, saw what he believed to be serious flaws in the military justice system during his 18-year career in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps.

"He had a very keen sense of justice," said Louis Font, a Boston lawyer and graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point who was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. "He had witnessed the rigging of trials in the military system . . . but was powerless to change it while he was in the military."

Mr. West's experience led him to write a UCLA law review article on the topic in 1970, which in 1977 became a book, "They Call It Justice: Command Influence and the Court-Martial System."

The Uniform Code of Military Justice, he wrote, was under the control of the military commander who "decided what charges to prosecute, what offenses were to be investigated, and what offenses were to be covered up. He still picked military juries . . . also picked the prosecution and defense lawyers as well as the military judge."

The book, still in use, influenced many military officers and lawyers, as did Mr. West's subsequent activism as a lawyer. The book and the law review article remain topical "because this is getting re-litigated, in [military] cases from Iraq," said one of his daughters, Robin West, a law professor at Georgetown University.

After he left the Army, Mr. West advised soldiers on their rights as conscientious objectors, winning honorable discharges for many. He also wrote and spoke on war crimes in Vietnam, arguing that the legal culpability for the My Lai massacre rested properly at the highest command levels and not with officers or soldiers on the ground. Injustice in any form sparked his interest, and in addition to military matters, he specialized in death penalty cases, employment discrimination cases and civil consumer fraud cases.

"He was a lawyer in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln," Font said. "He ennobled the profession."

Mr. West was born in Birmingham and served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Birmingham-Southern College, then received a degree from George Washington University Law School in 1950. He worked briefly for the old Federal Power Commission, then joined the Army and served at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and in Korea.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. West worked as a prosecutor in Baltimore for three years, then entered private practice. Tall and lanky, quick on his feet and described as excellent with cross-examination and courtroom strategy, Mr. West represented clients who had few other places to turn. He won an acquittal in a 1985 jury trial of Gordon Wiggs, who had been charged with arson and murder for a fire that killed six people in Baltimore.

During the 1960s and 1970s, he helped form a Citizen's Tribunal Against War Crimes and was an adviser and public speaker for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He also helped create and direct a system of hostels and safe houses for runaway and transient children on the East Coast in the early 1970s.

His first wife, Doris Claire Harper, died in 1974. A daughter, Anita West, died in 2001.

In addition to his daughter Robin West, of Baltimore, survivors include his wife of 30 years, Lelia Harris West of Severna Park; two other children from his first marriage, Katherine West Schroeder of Davis, Calif., and Derrick Harper West of Santa Rosa, Calif.; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.