At 87, Irascible Maryland Lawyer Makes a Good Case as Public Defender

BALTIMORE —  When people talk about Maryland’s public defender, the same adjectives keep cropping up: Irascible. Irreverent. Independent. Acerbic.

Eighty-seven-year-old Alan H. Murrell is, say friends and foes alike, a unique individualist.

“He is the antithesis, in a sense, of a bureaucrat,” said Robert C. Murphy, chief judge of Maryland’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. He calls Murrell irreverent and independent, and said: “No matter how important you are, Alan doesn’t take that into account.”

“He insults these people with a fair degree of panache and disdain. He treats them like blathering idiots,” said defense lawyer T. Joseph Touhey Jr., who worked with Murrell in the early years of the public defender’s office.

Recalls Incident

Touhey recalls the time a lawyer, hearing someone say something behind him, complained that Murrell had called him a name. “Alan says to the judge, ‘Your honor, I said no such thing. He may have been reading my mind, however.’ ”

Murrell, who is responsible for providing legal services for more than 100,000 people each year, routinely overspends his budget. When lawmakers chide him, he says he will spend whatever he has to and that is all there is to it.

When they suggest he retire, his response is: “I’m the last person in the world who would resign under that kind of pressure.”

As chief of a system that will spend $27 million this year to defend clients even he calls “the bottom of the barrel of humanity,” Murrell knows his is not a popular job. “I understand how the public feels,” he said. “My house has been broken into three times.”

But as public defender since the office was created in 1971, he believes he owes allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that the more than 100,000 men and women whose cases flow through his offices each year have a right to the best possible defense when they walk into a courtroom.

“We don’t get pleasure out of representing these people,” he said, adding that without his agency, there would be chaos in the courts. “The private bar can’t begin to handle . . . the indigent accused.”

Not ‘Fanatical’

While Murrell speaks eloquently of rights, Touhey said he is not “some sort of fanatical constitutional spouting type. That’s just not Alan. He’ll do the job because that’s what he was retained to do.”

Murrell’s major problem with the Legislature involves his budget. He says he spends more than he gets because he does not get enough. Critics, such as state Sens. Laurence Levitan and Julian Lapides, say he is a poor manager of money.

It was the dispute over money that prompted calls for his retirement, which Murrell easily dismisses. “I get cursed and kicked around and batted from pillar to post. I can’t say it has much impact on me.

“I’m not going to step down on the commands of Levitan and poor old Jack Lapides. Either one of those two bums couldn’t find his way into a courtroom with a Seeing Eye dog.”

‘He’s a Character’

Murphy believes such comments hurt Murrell, but Lapides and Levitan say that is not true. “I think his irascibility is marvelous,” Lapides said. “We all know he’s a character.” Told of Murrell’s comment about the Seeing Eye dog, he replied: “I think that’s wonderful.”

Murphy, who rates Murrell as one of the best criminal lawyers in the country with “a magnificent courtroom presence,” remembers when Murrell, cross-examining a police officer, suggested that the crime lab employee “couldn’t find an olive in a martini glass.”

Even though Murrell will turn 88 two days after Christmas, no one suggests that he retire because of his age. “When you’re 87, you tend to lose a step. Alan has done that, and I think he’d agree,” Murphy said.

Nevertheless, he said, Murrell “is still a winner.”

Murrell says he will not think about retiring until the office is on a sound financial footing. Only in the last two years, under Gov. William Donald Schaefer, has he gotten funds to handle his caseload; now he has to pay off past deficits.