hundred serious criminal cases, jury trials, and the majority of his
cases have led to acquittals, many of them in federal court.”
Ravenell’s acquittal rate in federal court actually lies somewhere
in the neighborhood of 70 percent, dwarfing the average in the
4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which, in 2010, was 8 percent,
according to Murphy. How does he do it?
“No one works harder on behalf of his clients than he does,”
says Gregg Bernstein, the state’s attorney for Baltimore city. “He
outworks his opponents in every case that he has.”
“You can’t get to his level of skill on talent alone,” says
Murphy. “It’s like saying Michael Jordan came out of the womb
shooting jump shots. No, this is the product of hard work and
incredible dedication.”
“He is the hardest working individual I know,” says Milin Chun, a
Murphy PA associate. “One of the first things he told me was, ‘If we
ever get outworked by the opponent, then we are doing something
wrong.’ It’s normal for young associates to work long, hard hours
while the partner is out golfing. But if you’re an associate working
with Ken Ravenell, you will never feel [abandoned] because he’s
right there with you, working even harder than you.”
If Ravenell works hard, he shakes off the notion that what he is
doing is hard work. He waves an arm at the window in his corner
office on the 23rd floor in downtown Baltimore. Outside, heat
radiates off the pavement in shimmering waves. His gesture,
however, is meant to point past the shining skyscrapers and
toward the little town 540 miles south where he grew up on a
sharecropper’s farm.
“ This isn’t hard,” he says. “Days like today, where it’s 100 degrees
out, you couldn’t just take the day off. My family needed the money.
You had to be out there working. We had these rows of cotton.
And it wasn’t like you were using machines to pick the cotton—we
were the machines. We were picking the cotton with our hands,
dragging bags behind us, picking the cotton and messing up
your hands, and the sun’s beaming down, and we’re all out there
together as a family, doing it. That is hard work.
“So when people ask me how I work so hard now, [I say] ‘You
think this is hard work? Using my brain? Shoot, I know what hard
work is. … I’ll take this any day. I’ll take this any day over what we
did back then.’”
RAVENELL WAS THE SEVENTH OF 11 CHILDREN BORN TO
Francis and Daisy Ravenell in a tiny town of Cross, S.C., 50 miles
east of Charleston. They kept a portion of the cash crops, such
as cotton and cucumbers, grown in their fields and a portion was
sharecropped for others. Each weekday, Ken would come home from
school in the early afternoon and go out to work the fields until it
was dark. Weekends he would begin picking with the sun.
Family needs may have required the children to work, but that
didn’t mean they could skip out on school. “My parents really
believed in education,” Ravenell says. “My mother made us believe
that she knew everything. We could always turn to her [with
questions] and as we grew she would send us to an older sibling.
We had a saying in our family: Each one teach one. You know, it
takes a village to raise a family.”
Ravenell’s older siblings attended all-black schools, but
South Carolina finally dropped “separate but equal” by 1959
when Ravenell was in fifth grade. “Thurgood Marshall was at
the forefront and I was amazed at what he had done,” Ravenell
remembers. “I thought, ‘I want to do what that man is doing.
I want to be a lawyer.’ That was it. That was the spark. I was
in fifth grade and I had never even met a lawyer, but I knew I
would become one.”
He was his high school valedictorian, then went on to South
Carolina State University, where he majored in political science,
working hard and acing his classes. All along, he focused on
becoming a lawyer—no matter the hardship. “I took the LSAT
and it was homecoming day,” he says. “Everybody was out with
the floats and celebrating. I remember the band playing and I’m
sitting there trying to take the LSAT.” He sighs and shakes his
head. “Can you believe it? Saturday morning. They scheduled it
on homecoming!”
After earning his J.D. at the University of Maryland School
of Law in 1984, he began his career working for the Baltimore
City State’s Attorney’s Office. “My first three years I was in the
prosecutor’s office,” he says. “That was important. I always knew I
was going to go out into private practice and be a criminal defense
trial lawyer … but I wanted to see how the other side worked.”
Armed with that knowledge, Ravenell joined Schulman, Treem,
Kaminkow & Gilden, where he defended clients accused of all sorts
of “street crimes”—mostly drug cases and murders. Over a 10-year
period, he argued hundreds of cases in open court, winning the
majority of them.
“I’ve taught law for 40 years,” says Gibson, “so I’ve seen a lot
of law students, and a lot of lawyers and a lot of judges. And Ken
clearly is one of the most persuasive advocates I’ve seen. … Juries
and judges find him very persuasive because he is reasonable and
sincere; he is not arguing but reasoning with them, which is an
interesting way of being a very effective advocate.”
In one case, in 2002, Ravenell’s client, Leeander Blake, was
charged with first-degree murder for shooting and then running
over his carjack victim. After he was arrested, Blake said he
didn’t want to talk without a lawyer. One of the arresting officers
provoked him, however, and he changed his mind; then they
obtained a confession.
Ravenell argued that coercing Blake to confess after he invoked
his right to counsel was a Miranda violation. The state court agreed
and so did the Maryland Court of Appeals. But then the U.S.
Supreme Court decided to hear the case.
Ravenell had tried appellate cases before, but never before the
highest court in the land. “The first thing that struck me,” he says,
“was how close you stand to the justices. You have nine justices
wrapped around you, and you’re standing in such close proximity
that you cannot just see their faces, but see what they think, when
they smirk, when they change [an expression], whatever. Luckily for
me, I was not intimidated; I had a very good argument.
“[At one point],” he adds, “Justice [Antonin] Scalia turns to me
with this deep voice: ‘Mr. Ravenell, don’t you think there are times
when it’s better for your client that he sits with the police and talks
with the police?’ I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Judge,
with all due respect, I’ve been doing this for 20-something years,
and I cannot think of one time it worked out better for my client
when he sat down and talked to the police without me being
