A Would-Be Lawyer’s Past and Character Go on Trial

Eben Gossage, 43, wants to become a lawyer. He passed the bar exam on his first try. His friends and business associates agree he has a keen mind, dogged persistence and integrity. A handful of elected city officials, including a state senator and the district attorney, are supporting his quest.

But the earnest, clean-cut Gossage has a past, a terrible past. Twenty-three years ago, in a crime that received national attention, the 20-year-old Gossage--a heroin-addicted child of one of the city’s most prominent families--killed his 19-year-old sister, bashing in her head with a hammer until her brain seeped out. He then stabbed her corpse nearly 50 times with a pair of scissors.

Gossage served a term in prison, eventually overcame his addictions and developed a career. Now, after three years of closed-door reviews by the State Bar, his struggle to practice law is before the California Supreme Court.

The case already has shed light on the secretive process by which the bar decides which applicants have the moral fitness to practice law in California. The court’s final decision is expected to clarify an important, but murky, moral issue: Just where does society draw the line between the simply horrible and the unforgivable?

The bar admits about 6,500 lawyers each year. All applicants are screened for moral fitness, filling out detailed questionnaires about their pasts. And despite the public’s dim view of lawyers, the vast majority of applicants have spotless records. But each year about 200 applicants with checkered pasts must meet with bar officials to explain prior transgressions. The bar rejects 20 or fewer annually.

Rules vary from state to state, but only a handful of jurisdictions automatically prevent ex-felons from becoming lawyers. In California, convictions may be overlooked by the bar if they occurred long ago, and if the applicant has shown remorse, been rehabilitated and served the community.

But lawyers are considered officers of the court, and California law says they must be “of good moral character”--something the applicant must prove.

Gossage’s case, legal experts say, raises questions about the meaning of rehabilitation and how to measure it.

Judging ‘Heart and Soul’ Is Subjective

In the end, the call is always subjective, said former bar judge Lise Pearlman.”You look at the current moral character of the applicant . . . not on whether this is someone you want to be associated with because of their past.”

Determining whom to reject is “the most difficult type of case I encountered,” said JoAnne Robbins, a lawyer with Karpman & Associates in Los Angeles who served as a state bar judge. “You are asked to look into someone’s heart and soul.”

Over the years, the state bar has quietly admitted dozens of law school graduates with criminal pasts, including murder. Like Gossage, many underwent trials at the bar, held behind closed doors, the files sealed from the public.

“Historically, the fact that someone has committed felonies--and committed some rather extreme felonies--has not kept them out of the bar,” said Peter Keane, a former bar director and the chief assistant public defender in San Francisco.

Bar admission decisions also change with society’s mores. A law school graduate who was denied a law license during the McCarthy era for refusing to take a loyalty oath won prompt acceptance decades later, said Erica Moeser, president of the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

When Ronald Reagan was governor, the bar refused to admit Daniel M. Siegel, a former UC Berkeley student body president and anti-war activist. Siegel had been charged with but acquitted of inciting riots in 1969 and 1970 in which one person was killed.

He appealed to the state Supreme Court, which ruled that he should be given a license.

But Gossage’s case does not involve a crime on which society’s view has changed. Instead, it centers on differing judgments about what constitutes rehabilitation and how it can be proved.

Four of the five bar judges who have reviewed Gossage’s case found him fit to practice law.

“The Mr. Gossage who now seeks admission is, for all essential purposes, a different person than the man who took his sister’s life 20 years ago,” wrote state bar Judge Nancy Roberts Lonsdale.

Uneasy bar prosecutors, by contrast, view Gossage as a dicey prospect. They insist that his past, including not just his major felony but a string of traffic offenses, shows he has not yet demonstrated a full transformation.

Gossage’s traffic citations during law school, for example, strongly suggest “a pattern of irresponsibility,” that indicates he is not fully reformed, the Committee of Bar Examiners said.

Now a small-scale developer and environmental activist, Gossage has served time for forgery, drug offenses and manslaughter.

Polite and self-effacing, he is a slender man with graying blond hair brushed to the side, gleaming teeth and blue eyes. In every new business or personal relationship, he has recounted his troubled past and has never been rejected because of it, Gossage said.

“I have been very lucky,” he said, wearing a stylish sport jacket and tie as he sipped herbal tea in a small restaurant in an industrial San Francisco neighborhood. “People have been very kind.”

Transcripts of Gossage’s bar trial show a parade of witnesses, with former professors, current business investors, state Senate Democratic leader John Burton, San Francisco Supervisor Sue Bierman and Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan all testifying on his behalf.

The theme of rehabilitation permeated the three-week proceeding. Burton himself has overcome a drug problem: cocaine addiction that torpedoed his previous congressional career. And Hallinan had to go to the Supreme Court to obtain a law license after the bar rejected him because of scrapes with the law and arrests in civil rights demonstrations.

Gossage “had emotional problems, drug and alcohol problems,” the district attorney said in an interview. “The things that he did are not things that would make you believe he is a person not to be trusted. . . . It wasn’t theft and it wasn’t cheating and lying.”

Gossage knows city officials through his real estate and environmental efforts. He works in a small trailer on a lot where he and an investor are developing lofts. He has a long-term relationship with a woman, but has not married. Running 40 minutes a day has kept him fit and sober and turned him into an activist for clean air. He would like to practice environmental law.

Tormented by addictions until he was 29, Gossage said he was to blame for all his problems. “I did not develop any inner strength,” he said, describing his childhood as good and his parents as caring and loving. “I didn’t learn how to cope with pain, with disappointment, with setbacks.”

Gossage said that he has been sober for 16 years and that drugs and alcohol no longer hold any allure for him, even in times of stress.

When he killed his sister during a struggle, he said, he was trying to defend himself but lost control. “I criminally overreacted,” he said.

Remorse Over Past Transgressions

If it weren’t for the notoriety of his family, Gossage’s manslaughter case probably would have attracted little attention. He came from the top tier of San Francisco society and descended to making his bed under parked cars.

His father, the late Howard Luck Gossage, was a nationally renowned advertising genius who revolutionized the business on the West Coast. Once described as the “cultural captain of San Francisco’s creative circles,” the senior Gossage palled around with journalists and literary types, and his name appeared regularly in local newspaper columns.

When he married the former Mary Baty, a member of a wealthy Midwest banking family, the event was covered in the society pages. The couple separated when Eben was 5 and his sister, Amelia, called Amy, was 4. The parents formed separate households in wealthy Pacific Heights, the children living with their mother.

Although financially secure, the family struggled with private demons. Mary Gossage, a liberal social activist, drank so much that it eventually killed her. Howard Gossage, consumed by his career, did not truly bond with his son until Eben was 14 and working in his offices. Shortly afterward, the elder Gossage died of leukemia.

By the time he was 16, Eben was drinking heavily, using drugs and stealing to support his addictions. He forged checks he stole from his mother and grandmother, and went to jail.

“His addiction was a desperate addiction,” remembers San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Brown.

Eben was in jail when his mother was found dead in her home on Mother’s Day in 1974. Prison authorities refused to let Eben attend her funeral.

After his release, he moved to expensive Telegraph Hill, only a couple of blocks from the apartment of his sister, a strong-willed, physically striking artist who was often described as his best friend. The pair lived on trust funds they had inherited from their family and saw each other often. On Feb. 12, 1975, Eben was waiting in his sister’s apartment when she returned home with a friend. He was drunk, and she became so furious that she tried to hit him with a hammer, a witness later told police.

He returned the next day and argued with his sister over who was to blame for their mother’s alcoholism. He said she grabbed a hammer and scissors and threatened to poke out his eyes. He wrestled the hammer away and “hit her until I was free,” he told the bar. “And now I know that I hit her many times and it caused her death.”

After he realized she was dead, he pummeled her back with his fists, one of which held the scissors. “I was blaming her for causing her own death,” he testified at his trial.

The police eventually found the weapons in Gossage’s apartment and booked him for murder, despite his initial denials.

In a holding cell the next day, Gossage was “this wasted, pathetic addict who looked like a little kid, shaking and shivering and crying,” Keane recalls.

Not a day passes when Gossage does not think about his sister’s death, he told the bar court. He said he could have freed himself without killing her. “Instead, because of my criminal acts of continuing to hit her, she is dead. And she was 19, and all of her life from 19 on she will never have. . . .”

“There is no way to compensate. There is no way to return the life you have taken.”

Gossage pleaded self-defense in his murder trial, but the jury found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

“This is a very sad case,” the late Superior Court Judge Edward L. Cragen said at the time. Noting that the jury could have accepted the self-defense claim, he sentenced Gossage to a minimum of six months, but Gossage served three years before he was released on parole.

Out on the streets again, Gossage resumed drinking and taking drugs. He was convicted of drunk driving and drug possession. He stole money from a woman who allowed him to stay at her house and tried to steal a watch from a high-priced hotel.

It was only after another term in prison that, at the age of 29, he maintained sobriety.

Gossage stayed sober without help from a support group, making a “conscious, willful, rigid determination . . . almost a military type of decision,” to turn himself around, said forensic psychologist Jonathan E. French, whom the bar hired to examine Gossage.

Assessing Psychology

A battery of mental tests found no illness or condition that would cause Gossage to relapse, French testified.

But, he added at the bar trial: “There remains this sort of haunted quality that I see emerging from my test data. . . . Underneath Mr. Gossage’s cultivated exterior there lurks a measure of resentment and dysphoria [discontent] of which he may not be entirely aware.”

If Gossage’s troubled past had ended with his addiction, he might already have been admitted to practice law. But in the years in which he put himself through college and law school--his trust fund long exhausted--he was hauled into small claims court and received eight misdemeanor convictions from traffic violations he had failed to clear up on a timely basis.

“A single misdemeanor conviction in one’s lifetime is typically a significant mark on anyone’s record,” the bar said in court papers. “Having eight such convictions over the course of a six-year period surely raises concerns.”

But Gossage’s explanations and expressions of remorse satisfied the bar’s trial judge and two members of a three-judge bar panel that heard the appeal. The dissenting judge said Gossage needed to show rehabilitation over a “more prolonged period of time.”

“We are confronted with an applicant who continually has a ready excuse for not observing society’s laws or the application rules of his chosen profession,” wrote Judge H. Kenneth Norian.

Among the issues before the state high court is the standard on which to judge applicants. Bar examiners believe that they should be held to the strictest scrutiny and demonstrate a lengthy period of continued, unblemished, exemplary conduct “by the most clear and convincing evidence.”

Ephraim Margolin, one of the city’s top criminal defense lawyers, is representing Gossage. Margolin said he “began to sweat” when six of the Supreme Court’s seven justices granted the bar examiners’ petition to review Gossage’s case.

“If they rule against what unimpeachably and clearly is recovery of an individual, if we lose on that ground, then that is a lesson that nobody within our judiciary cares whether you are actually reformed,” Margolin said.

For his part, Gossage puts the matter simply: He anticipated a lengthy investigation by the bar but, he says, “I believed I could show my past was behind me and that I would be a good lawyer.”