Lawrence O'Donnell; lawyer won wrongful death case; 87

Lawrence O'Donnell, questioning a former Capitol police officer. Mr. O'Donnell, a former officer himself, was defending three officers facing discharge for trying to solicit funds to help gain passage of legislation backing a pay raise for the officers. (Jack O'Connell/globe staff/file 1964)

Lawrence F. O'Donnell liked tough cases. He was the lawyer for three Brinks robbery defendants and represented other people because their personal stories resonated with an Irish Catholic guy who grew up poor in Jamaica Plain. Some clients, though, simply appealed to his appetite for a good challenge.

"Too many lawyers are looking for nothing but easy cases," he told his son, who quoted Mr. O'Donnell in a eulogy Saturday. "If you don't take the hard ones, if you don't keep doing it, you'll lose the audacity to do it. And then you've really lost."

Like any defense attorney, Mr. O'Donnell lost his share of cases, but no one ever chalked up a loss in his audacity column. A colorful, often combative presence in Boston's courts since he graduated from law school in 1950, Mr. O'Donnell died Feb. 18 in Massachusetts General Hospital of complications from an infection. He was 87 and lived in Quincy.

"He set off in life with no advantages at all and simply did not know how to take no for an answer," said Lawrence Jr. of Santa Monica, Calif., who spoke at his father's funeral. "With him, there were two-sided coins to everything. He had great respect for authority but an inability to accept its dictates, and that's noticeable in many of the brave choices he made as a lawyer."

Nowhere was that trait more apparent than in Mr. O'Donnell's dealings with law enforcement. Before becoming a lawyer, he was an officer with the Boston Police Department and the Capitol Police at the State House. Along with representing those charged with crimes, he successfully defended police officers accused of brutality or corruption.

Then came the case of James Bowden. During a robbery investigation, two white Boston police officers shot and killed the 25-year-old black man in 1975, a time of intense racial strife in the city. Internal police investigations exonerated the officers, but Mr. O'Donnell represented Bowden's widow in a wrongful death lawsuit and prevailed twice, including after the first verdict was appealed.

Mr. O'Donnell told the Globe in 1978 that because of his own experience as an officer, "I have a healthy skepticism about what the police say." In court he was blunt, saying of the night Bowden died: "Bigotry pulled those triggers."

That argument convinced the all-white jury, which awarded Bowden's widow and children $250,000.

Mr. O'Donnell's son wrote "Deadly Force," a book about the Bowden shooting and trial that became a television movie and turned the case into the most celebrated in a career that had no shortage of high-wattage moments.

In the mid-1960s, Mr. O'Donnell took on the Internal Revenue Service, asserting that the federal agency was harassing him for representing clients with cases pending before the IRS. In 1973, Mr. O'Donnell represented Jerome P. Troy, a Dorchester District Court judge who was disbarred and removed from the bench for practices such as extensively using court officers for personal business.

Mr. O'Donnell himself faced contempt charges in 1969 for his conduct representing a client who was sentenced to die for a Chelsea homicide.

The adversarial role of an attorney came naturally to Mr. O'Donnell, who was no stranger to adversity. An identical twin and one of four children, he was almost 11 when his father committed suicide.

"When my father died, he bequeathed us the whole world," Mr. O'Donnell told the Globe in 1958.

The inheritance was more spiritual than financial, however, and his mother's struggles to raise her children made him sympathetic, some 40 years later, to Bowden's widow.

"When Mrs. Bowden first came into his office, he couldn't look at her without thinking of his own mother being in the same situation," said his son, who is now a political commentator.

After graduating from Jamaica Plain High School, Mr. O'Donnell joined the US Army Air Corps and married Frances Buckley in 1942, while stationed in Miami.

Discharged as a sergeant in 1945, he became a Boston police officer, and his time in courtrooms inspired him to spend nights attending Suffolk University Law School, from which he graduated in 1950.

"He told me that on the witness stand in his uniform, he found himself studying the defense lawyers who were trying to confound him with questions, and he thought, 'I could do that,' " Mr. O'Donnell's son said in his eulogy.

Theatrical in court, Mr. O'Donnell quickly built a reputation as the go-to guy for clients whom other lawyers waved away. In a lengthy examination of the Bowden case, published in 1978, the Globe reported that Mr. O'Donnell "has been called 'an indefatigable defender of the oppressed' and 'a good, tough, brawling lawyer. He has been called a lot of other, unprintable, things by opponents over the years. . . . He has never been accused of understatement, timidity, or excessive modesty."

Mr. O'Donnell was 57 when the jury awarded Bowden's family $250,000.

"The great athletes are at their best when they're 25, and the great trial lawyers are at their best when they're closer to 60, and that's where he was when the Bowden case was moving through the courts," said Mr. O'Donnell's son, who worked on "The West Wing" television show as a writer and producer. "In addition to everything else it was, the Bowden case was about a great trial lawyer at the peak of his skills and abilities."

Practicing law with his sons for decades, Mr. O'Donnell was averse to retiring and kept an office in Quincy, closer to home, in recent years. His marriage ended in divorce.

In 1987, he received an award at the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast and drew sustained applause during an energetic speech that touched on issues ranging from an ongoing federal investigation of police corruption to a civil rights march in Georgia.

"He grew up in the very provincial, highly judgmental Irish-American culture in Boston," his son said. "Where did he get the generosity of spirit to not be condemningly judgmental as a normal reflex? If there's something I'm most proud of, it was his ability to transcend the inherited prejudices and judgmental aspects of his culture and take actions that were clearly the right thing to do, based on seeing the world as it should be."

In addition to his son and his former wife, of Falmouth, Mr. O'Donnell leaves three other sons, Michael of Quincy, Kevin of Cohasset, and William of Lowell; a daughter, Mary O'Donnell Downey of Falmouth; a sister, Patricia Nawn of Marshfield; and nine grandchildren.

A service has been held.