BRIEFS
The rookie was coming up to bat—in the
cool, cloistered halls of the U.S. Supreme
Court. David E. Mills was just 33 years old
and a solo practitioner at The Mills Law
Office, based out of a spare room in his
Cleveland apartment, when he hit the ball
out of the park with a unanimous high-court victory.
The ruling overturned a 6th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals’ decision, based on a
technical issue, which had thrown out a
$625,000 award to Mills’ client, Michelle
Ortiz. She had sued state officials
over sexual assaults by an Ohio prison
guard. Ortiz, who was serving 12 months
after assaulting an abusive husband
with a knife, had been sent to solitary
confinement when she complained about
the guard’s attacks.
Mills learned of the Supreme Court’s
decision in early January 2011. So did the
rest of the appellate community. Since
then, life has not been the same for Mills.
He has been asked by trial attorneys
across the nation to assess whether their
cases might make it to the Supreme
Court. He says the sudden notoriety
doesn’t feel odd. “It would if I didn’t have
the experience to back it up,” he says, “but
I’ve spent the last several years studying
appellate law.” Mills also teaches an
appellate course at Case Western Reserve
University School of Law.
After graduating from The University
of Michigan Law School with honors in
2002, Mills spent four years practicing
litigation at Jones Day in Cleveland,
DETAIL WORK IS THIS CLEVELAND APPELLATE LAWYER’S FORTE BY BOB GEBALLE
THE ANALYTICAL MIND OF DAVID E. MILLS
followed by a clerkship with U.S. District
Judge Louis Oberdorfer in Washington,
D.C. “I was interested in appeals, and
realized it may be an opportunity to
litigate big cases without having an army
of assistants—things are a bit more finite
at the appeals stage,” he says.
Appellate law suited his personality. “I’m
very analytical—I was a math major as an
undergraduate [at Colgate University],”
he says. “I try to take complicated legal
arguments and distill them down.” That
takes time: Mills estimates he spent at
least 450 hours preparing the Ortiz case,
with no certainty of compensation.
“I look at whether there’s a way to apply
the rules or a fundamental principle which
no one has seen,” says Mills. “If something
strikes you as wrong about [a sentence or
outcome], can you fix it within the existing
system of laws?”
Mills’ technical know-how is coupled
with a profound interest in social justice,
which was instilled in him as a child. “I
grew up in Cleveland Heights. It was a very
racially mixed area, and I became really
attuned to racist comments and social
justice issues. They sort of stuck with me
and became a broader question of the
impact of poverty.”
While in law school, working in a
criminal appellate clinic, Mills met a
young man, Corey Frazier, exactly his age,
who had been incarcerated since he was
17. Frazier was serving a life sentence—
he had gone along on a drug deal with
another man who shot and killed two
people. “[Frazier] was soft-spoken, very
smart, a nice guy,” Mills says. “It was a
drug deal gone bad, and he was in prison
for the rest of his life. … I realized that if
things were a bit different, that could have
been me.”
The young attorney wrote a brief for
Frazier arguing that his trial attorney had
been ineffective and Frazier was entitled
SPOTLIGHT
to a new trial. The retrial was granted,
and ultimately Frazier pleaded to a lesser
crime and received a shortened sentence.
He is due to be released in a few years.
Mills has maintained contact with him,
calling every few weeks.
More recently, Mills was co-counsel,
along with Jones Day attorneys, for Joe
D’Ambrosio, a death row inmate who
was convicted in the 1988 murder of
a neighborhood teen, then granted a
retrial when it was found that evidence
had been withheld. He was later released
on house arrest when it was discovered
that yet more evidence had been
withheld. Just before the retrial, a key
witness died. D’Ambrosio was freed; the
charges dismissed.
Mills also served as co-counsel for
Kevin Keith, who was on death row in a
triple-murder case. Keith won clemency in
2010 from Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who
noted that “many legitimate questions
have been raised regarding the evidence
in support of the conviction and the
investigation which led to it.”
In Mills’ view, the issues surrounding
social justice are part of a broader issue
of poverty. He believes appellate law is
an effective place to bring about change.
“Some people ask, ‘How could you work
with anyone who is a criminal?’” he says.
“But typically I am not trying to get them
off [for] their crime. I am arguing that
their sentence is too harsh and should be
reduced, or trying to get them a fair trial
because errors have occurred.”
As for the location of his firm, Mills has
no plans to move. “I have a good setup
here with a full office,” he says. “The
Supremes didn’t seem to mind it.”
