Adrian Baca's guest appearances

Adrian Baca

Trial Lawyer Talk Podcast

Corinne Mullen

Colby Vokey

Zaki Zehawi

Terry Lenamon

Betsy Greene

Eric Fong

Brooks Cutter

Scott Glovsky

Nelson Tyrone

Mel Orchard

Vicki Slater

Joshua Karton

Rafe Foreman

Paula Estefan

Eric Ganci

OwlTail

About Adrian BacaAdrian Baca is a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney. His law firm defends California clients against a full range of felony criminal charges including violent crimes, sex crimes, drug offenses, and federal crimes. The firm also assist clients with post-conviction matters.About the CaseAdrian Baca established trust with Reggie and used psychodrama techniques to understand how the victim shot himself. In a risky move, Mr. Baca called Reggie to the stand where he admitted to being a gang member, to a manslaughter conviction, and to other offenses. During the trial, they recreated the incident in front of the jurors.Adrian ends with how he tries to protect those people who feel they aren’t a part of the larger community and who need help.Other Episodes of Trial Lawyer TalkTo listen to other episodes of Trial Lawyer Talk and hear from the best trial lawyers in the country, go here.Transcript of Episode 64, with Adrian BacaScott Glovsky:   Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk. I’m Scott Glovsky. I’m your host for this podcast, where we speak with some of the best trial lawyers, who are telling great stories from cases that had a profound impact on them. Today, we have another great episode, so let’s get going.I feel very fortunate to be sitting with Adrian Baca. Adrian is a wonderful criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles who wins cases that nobody should win. I know he wins them with skill, creativity and dedication. Adrian, thanks for being with us.Adrian Baca:       Thank you for the invitation and the kind words, Scott.Scott Glovsky:   Adrian, can you share with us the story of a case that had a profound impact on you?Adrian Baca:       The story that had a profound impact on me actually has a catchy headline. It was a subject of an article in Rolling Stone Magazine. It’s, “How I killed my way out of prison.” It became a retrial. It came to me, and I realized this case was symbolic, in a lot of ways, wrongful conviction, a man who was out suing the police, now he was going to go back to prison. It had a lot of twists and turns.Scott Glovsky:   Wow. Please tell us.Adrian Baca:       Well, it was a case I was actually appointed on. He went to trial after he got out of prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He was looking at the death penalty. He got involved, and they accused him of another shooting. It went to trial. He was charged with mayhem and a gang allegation. He was looking at life. One of the best attorneys in Los Angeles hung at nine to three. I was covering the court in Compton and Los Angeles, and the judge appointed me.Initially, when Mr. Cole met me, very standoffish. “You’re not going to be my attorney.” I just knew, something about this case, that we had a connection and a karma. I knew that I was going to go to trial on his case. He didn’t know it yet, but I knew it.Scott Glovsky:   How did you know it?Adrian Baca:       I think by just sensing things. Sometimes you have an intuition about destinies interchanging and paths crossing with somebody. I just knew. I knew it. In the core of my bones, I knew. I knew that it was going to be a big, giant case, because I received boxes and boxes of discovery.Scott Glovsky:   How did you start?Adrian Baca:       I started by accepting my client’s reluctance to have me as an attorney. I told him I was going to be an attorney until I heard otherwise. The court appointed me. I started working on the case and going through the transcripts of the trial.Then I started meeting with my client a little more. We started establishing a relationship of trust. I introduced him to some of the techniques we used at the Trial Lawyers College, reversing roles, setting scenes, being there for him all the time.Understand, this man had been in prison for a murder he didn’t commit for 20 years. He was looking at the death penalty. He was out of custody now, and he was potentially looking at 5, 10 million dollars. His co-defendant settled for 8 million.Everybody in his life had disappointed him, his family, the police who set him up, in prison, the brutality of prison. He had to kill somebody inside of the prison who was going to kill him. It was a horrible condition, the kind that you would imagine in one of the most typical prison movies. It was like that.So it was establishing trust. Me being there, me meeting on his terms, and just reinforcing and gaining one piece of trust at a time.Scott Glovsky:   What happened next?Adrian Baca:       What happened next is we went to trial quicker than I thought. I started meeting with my client a lot more and doing scene reenactments. It was a shooting case, and I had to understand. Essentially what we’re saying is the victim shot himself.Scott Glovsky:   That sounds like a plausible defense.Adrian Baca:       Well, it was scary. My feeling was I was … The first attorney didn’t put his client on the stand. I know Gerry Spence says typically he doesn’t do that, but I always prepare every case like my client is going to take the stand.So we prepared and we prepared. We did scene reenactments in my office. Some of them actually became quite harrowing for me, where I realized that my client was decompensating a bit and was mixing up roles, because he had some post-traumatic stress that he didn’t deal with. I pulled back. We don’t ever want to become a psychodramatist.Scott Glovsky:   Can you tell us what happened?Adrian Baca:       Well, what happened is we redid the scene. He became so animated that he relived the scene, and I could see it in his eyes. He started reverting to like he was in prison. I feared for my safety. I looked at my desk and I thought, “Where are those scissors? I’m going to have to stab him to defend myself.”Scott Glovsky:   Can you go in role as him at that moment?Adrian Baca:       I was angry. I’m angry, Baca. I’m angry. Where’s my money at? Where’s my money at? You motherfucker. Baca, where’s my money?Reggie, I’m not your civil attorney.Baca motherfucker, I got screwed out of that money. I got screwed out of that money, Baca. Where’s my money, Baca?He’s looking at me. I can see his eyes are … He’s in the role. He’s not playing the role. He is that person at that time. He’s mixing me up with the civil attorney, and he’s mad because he feels he’s going to be cheated $3 million.He’s putting his hands in the front of his pants. He’s coming at me. He’s looking hard. This is an admitted Hoover gang member. The Hoover gang is a pretty bad gang. I knew that I had to be very, very careful and very affirming. I am not your civil attorney. I am not your civil attorney. I am not your civil attorney.Scott Glovsky:   What was your soliloquy at that moment?Adrian Baca:       My soliloquy was I was looking for the scissors. This is going to be a bad incident that I took something on that exploded in my face. But at the same time, I understood his pain. I became like an empath, and I took his pain, and I allowed him to … I trusted him, even though it was some mistrust for my safety, I was worried, but I took his pain. I knew that it was something that he had to get over. In hindsight, we should have had a trained psychodramatist.Scott Glovsky:   How does that scene end?Adrian Baca:       It ended with him calming down, meaning his breath was calm, his manner was calm. I brought in four or five people, people who work adjacent to me, that have helped me. I said, “We’re going to do it again.”I think he had gone through the scene enough, and we had a time crunch, that we did it, and it was much more … Without the violence or the fear, we went through it, and it was very powerful. So we had gotten over that period of fear.After that, what I did is, I run the local working group in Los Angeles, I brought him to the group. We had 20 attorneys, 20 attorneys. We worked on his case. We did scene reenactments. We had him … I put him on the stand for direct examination. Patrick McLean, who’s a TLC graduate helped. Suzie Mindlin helped. A lot of attorneys helped. At the end, he understood he had been socialized about to be honest and to be vulnerable.So when it came to the trial, after five weeks, the judge thought I was going to rest. She said, “Mr. Baca, are you going to rest?” I said, “No, Your Honor, I’m waiting for a ruling from the court of appeals to keep this evidence out.” She said, “Call your witness.” I said, “Can we wait until 12:00?” “Call your witness.”I called Reggie Cole to the stand. We did the scene in front of the jury. The judge had trusted me. I was upright with her. We fought a bit, but she let me get Reggie off the stand. So we got Reggie off the stand, then we reenacted it. He threw me around a bit. I could look at the jurors, and they had a look of horror in their eye. They were fearful for me, because he was throwing me around, and we were making noise. I said, “Reggie, was it like this?” He goes, “No. It was four times as violent.”I think by putting him on the stand, it humanized him. By showing the tussling and the wrestling, the jury could clearly see how the tussling of the gun pointed the barrel of the gun down and hit him in the leg.Scott Glovsky:   You’re saying the alleged victim, or the other person involved …Adrian Baca:       Right. It was our testimony that the victim brought out the gun, and that there was a struggle over the gun. They both had their hand over the gun. As they were tussling over the gun, the barrel of the gun pointed down, and at that point, one of them pulled the trigger, and that shot the victim in the leg.The interesting part of the case is not every case ends gloriously. It turned out, after five weeks and five days of deliberation, the prosecutor, unbeknownst to me, went behind my back and talked to the prior lawyer, and offered him a deal of time served, while the jury was deliberating. At that point, my client had settled his wrongful conviction case for, I think, $5 million. He said, “Baca, I’m going to take the plea of time served.”We brought the jury out, and I asked them, “What is your vote?” It was 11 to one. I looked at one guy and I said, “You were the one.” It was the foreman who was holding out for guilt. We had 11 jurors, mostly … One African American woman whose son had been shot, who I left on, a lot of Anglo school teachers from Long Beach who knew nothing about gangs.Afterwards, the most interesting thing I’ve ever seen, they stayed in the jury box while we talked to them about what was going on, and how much they appreciated the case, and how much they appreciated Reggie. It was very interesting.I realized in hindsight that I did leave one juror on who I had that same instinct, but I left on. He was the juror that held out. I think he felt a little bit guilty, and maybe he would have come around, or maybe it would have been another hung jury.But afterwards we, the jurors and myself and Reggie met outside of the court. We took selfies together. We became Facebook friends. Reggie’s become Facebook friends with him, and then Reggie’s agreed to go out as part of this plea, no jail time, to go out with the prosecutor and to talk about gangs and gang intervention.So Reggie’s free of the gangs. He can’t come back into the neighborhood. I’m worried about him sometimes, that he doesn’t do it. But I think it’s a heroic story of a man who was going to go back to prison again for life, after he got out of prison when he was in there for life, and then looking at the death penalty.Scott Glovsky:   Wow. What impact did this case have on Adrian Baca?Adrian Baca:       Trust, trust myself. I didn’t sabotage myself. I was sick. I was tired. I knew I had to get in there and fight, and give it everything I had. I wondered if I could. I knew one of the best attorneys in Los Angeles hung it.So for me, it was an affirmation of the Trial Lawyers College techniques that I had practiced and practiced and practiced. I wondered whether they would pay off. They have been paying off, but this was my ultimate test. It was trusting the process, being open, putting a client on the stand, telling the full story, and that the jury could come to the conclusion, one, that he didn’t do it, and two, that there was humanity in him, that he was worthy of love.Even though they’re school teachers in Long Beach, he was a Hoover gang member that was at Calipatria Prison, the worst prison, probably, in California, they were more alike than different. I reached the conclusion that people are just, if you allow them to be just and give them information, and not to be as scared, and to sometimes run towards the danger.Scott Glovsky:   What do you mean by that?Adrian Baca:Well, the first attorney didn’t put him on the stand. My feeling is that I wasn’t there to hang the case. I was there to walk him out of there. So I put him on the stand, where he admitted he was a gang member. We admitted a manslaughter conviction, or he admitted other offenses.My feeling was, as a criminal defense attorney, to not defend the case, but to prosecute the case. It’s much more powerful. I know that there’s a saying at the Trial Lawyers College, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. If you’re defending, you’re losing. So it was getting our story out.Scott Glovsky:   Wow. What’s the hardest part of being a trial lawyer?Adrian Baca:       I’d say to be a very successful trial lawyer, criminal defense, it takes a lot of effort and resources. It is taxing on me. I realize I put so much into my cases that … I don’t have an infinite amount of energy. It depletes my energy. It depletes me. It’s life or death struggles.I’m 56 years old today. I realized that, boy, it takes a lot out of me. So I don’t look forward to going to battle. But once I do, I realize that I have to give it everything I have. It can be taxing. It can be alienating to my family and loved ones, because I’m so involved in defending people.Scott Glovsky:   Adrian, as we sit here on your birthday, and happy birthday …Adrian Baca:       Thanks, Scott.Scott Glovsky:   If the 56-year-old Adrian Baca could talk with the 8-year-old Adrian Baca, what would you tell him?Adrian Baca:       I’d say 8-year-old Adrian Baca was lonely, playful.Scott Glovsky:   I want you to do this in role, as you today.Adrian Baca:       I feel like I miss my father, because my mother and father are divorced. I have three sisters. My mother loves me. My dad loves me, but he only sees me on the weekends. I’m trying to find myself. I feel a little bit outside of the normal, because I’m Mexican living in an Anglo community in a Mexican city of El Paso, Texas. I feel like an outsider.I guess what I would say is that, as a 56-year-old Adrian, that I try to protect those people who also feel not part of the larger part of the community, that need help.Scott Glovsky:   As you today, talking to you as an 8-year-old, go ahead and tell him what you want to tell him.Adrian Baca:       That being lonely sometimes can be beautiful, because you have to go inside of yourself. You have to watch, and you can see how people interact. You’ll grow out of this, but you’ll always be the lonely boy. So the lonely boy will meet a stronger man. Together, I think that you both co-exist.Scott Glovsky:   What would you tell him about what accomplishments he’s going to have in his life?Adrian Baca:       At that point, I would have preferred to say, “Hey, you made it to the major leagues in baseball.” I didn’t imagine I’d be an attorney.I’d say, “Be patient, but you’re going to accomplish more than you thought. Life will be far more interesting than you ever thought. But part of you is never going to grow up. You’re still going to be, in 56-year-old Adrian, in 60-year-old Adrian, you’re a big part of them. That part of Adrian likes to play. He likes to have fun, is very serious, but at heart it will always be 8 years old.”Scott Glovsky:   I would tell 8-year-old, Adrian, that you’re going to save lives. You’re going to help a lot of folks. You’re going to change people’s lives, not just your clients, but their families. You’re going to be successful, respected, accomplished and loved.As I’m talking to 56-year-old Adrian Baca, sitting across this table from me, I’m going to tell you that you are accomplished. You’ve changed lives. You’re changing lives. You’re saving lives. You’re helping people. It’s been my honor to talk to you.Adrian Baca:       I’m glad we sat down, Scott. I didn’t know what to expect, but I appreciate knowing you and looking at your eyes. I didn’t imagine you’d open me up like this, but it feels good to be transparent with you. So thank you, Scott.Scott Glovsky:Thank you, Brother. Thank you for spending the time and sharing your wisdom and great, great story with us.Adrian Baca:       Anytime, Scott.Scott Glovsky:   Thank you for joining us today for Trial Lawyer Talk. If you liked the show, I’d really appreciate if you could give us a good review on iTunes. I’d love to get your feedback. You can reach me www.scottglovsky.com. That’s S-C-O-T-T G-L-O-V-S-K-Y.com. I’d love to hear your feedback.You can also check out the book that I published, called “Fighting Health Insurance Denials: A Primer For Lawyers.” That’s on Amazon. I put the book together based on 20 years of suing health insurance companies for denying medical care to people. It provides a general outline of how to fight health insurance denials.Have a great week. We’ll talk to you in the next episode. The post Trial Lawyer Talk, Episode 64, with Adrian Baca appeared first on Law Offices of Scott Glovsky.

Trial Lawyer Talk, Episode 64, with Adrian Baca