almost exclusively handled felony appeals.
That was the primary lure for Sevilla.
“I love doing appeals,” he says. “In
the trial arena, everything comes at
you incredibly fast and it’s an incredibly
stressful experience. I compare it to a man
with a butterfly net. The issues are coming
at you, and you catch some and miss
others. The appeal is an opportunity to
strategically think through your position in
the briefing. I like the deliberative process
and the opportunity to write my position.”
But he never cared for the bureaucracy
of state government, and, in 1983, after
Gov. George Deukmejian cut the office’s
budget in half, he left. Enter his old boss,
Cleary, with whom he had stayed in touch.
The two started their own firm after
agreeing on two rules. “We would never
have any associates, and we would practice
our own law,” Sevilla says.
Their type of law was groundbreaking.
Two years after going into private practice,
Sevilla established the current standard
for the insanity defense. People v. Skinner
involved a schizophrenic who thought God
permitted him to kill his wife because of
the “till death do us part” clause of the
marital vow. Sevilla successfully petitioned
to reverse a variant of the ancient “wild
beast test” for insanity. Previously, the
defendant had to show he or she did not
understand the nature and quality of the
act and did not understand right from
wrong. Skinner established that it could be
either, not that it had to be both.
Several years later, Sevilla handled
the much-publicized appeal of former
Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who had been
convicted of 12 perjury counts and one
count of conspiracy for violating the
fair political practices act. “His trial was
the last sequestered jury in San Diego
County, and this case made sure there
would never be another,” Sevilla says.
“The juries were partying, drinking and
talking to the bailiff about the case. The
justice said they gave new meaning to
‘hung jury’ because one of the jurors was
hung over during the verdict.”
Sevilla filed a 250-page brief in the
appeals court. In 1991, the dozen perjury
counts were thrown out at the state
Supreme Court, and Hedgecock accepted a
conviction of a single misdemeanor count in
exchange for no jail sentence and no retrial.
Headline-making cases are not always
successes, of course. “Most of Chuck’s
battles are really uphill ones,” Cleary says.
Sevilla turns morose when he thinks
of the uphill battles he’s lost. He talks at
length about a recent client who killed
his cousin with a knife. “[ The cousin] was
like a sister to him, but he got paranoid
and thought she represented the forces
of darkness.” The client was convicted
and sentenced to 29 years to life. Sevilla
thought he made a compelling case before
the Supreme Court—that in the original
trial, the attorney made a mistake in not
pursing an insanity plea.
“The Supreme Court suggested in
their opinion that the original attorney
did a great job because his client wasn’t
sentenced to death or life without the
possibility of parole,” Sevilla says. “But he
never faced those sentences! It surprised
me the Supreme Court made an error of
that magnitude without correcting it. But
it’s as one justice said: ‘We are final not
because we’re perfect, but because we’re
the last court in town.’”
One of his most emotionally difficult
cases was the death sentence appeal of
convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris
in 1992.
“Chuck took personal calls from Harris
and helped with the guy’s morale,”
Cleary says. “When he was fighting the
execution up to the last second, Chuck
was right up in the institution in the
interview room.”
It was Sevilla’s uneasy task to monitor
his client through the night to determine if
he would suffer a mental collapse—which
would mean he could not be executed, since
condemned prisoners must be legally sane
at the moment they are strapped into the
chair to receive cyanide so they understand
the punishment.
Sevilla had negotiated unmonitored
phone access to Harris’ cell behind the
gas chamber to keep him informed of the
attempts to stay the execution. During the
evening, as Harris ate his last meal, stays
were issued by lower courts, and then
overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cleary recalls talking to Harris at 4:08
a.m., finding him “hyper-excited, hungry
for details of what had happened.”
At 5:48 a.m., on April 21, the U.S.
Supreme Court vacated the last stay and
Sevilla said goodbye to Harris, who was
escorted to the gas chamber. Sevilla sat
numbly for the next hour staring out the
window as witnesses to the execution
filtered out of San Quentin. It was the
state’s first execution in a quarter-century.
AS A WAY TO VENT THE FRUSTRATIONS
of his work, Sevilla has written two satiric
novels about a lawyer, John Wilkes,
named for a 17th-century, English, radical
journalist and politician who spent much
of his life alternately being jailed and
elected to public office. Sevilla situated
Wilkes’ adventures in New York so no
one would think the characters were
modeled on actual San Diego attorneys.
Consequently, many New York lawyers
wrote to him, asking if the characters were
based on their friends. “I told them all this
speaks to is the transcendental quality of
the courtroom,” Sevilla says. “Whether in
New York or San Diego, the experiences
are the same.”
No one would ever mistake Wilkes for
Sevilla, however. “He curses, bamboozles,
wheedles, whines, and wins any way he
can,” Sevilla writes of Wilkes in one of the
novels. “He never met a judge he could
respect.”
In contrast, when Sevilla talks about his
clients, there is an unmistakable fondness.
“[Mayor Hedgecock] may have made errors
of judgments, but that balances against
all the good he did,” says Sevilla. The
schizophrenic who stabbed his cousin to
death was, Sevilla says, “a nice young man
who is stable and makes sense when he is
under heavy psychotropic.
“In the work I do, you need to have
compassion for your fellow man,” Sevilla
adds. “Yes, they might have done wrong
or made colossal misjudgments. Although
they are being judged by the court system
for the worst thing they did in their life, I
look at their life span. I don’t judge them by
the worst thing they did, but by the whole
fabric of the threads of their life.”
