A lawyer’s courtroom battles for the poor, people of color, freedom of speech, and critical wildlife habitat
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Tom Fels: In ‘Renegade for Justice,’ former area attorney reflects on adventures defending our rights
By Tom Fels – Sep 11, 2023 Updated Sep 13, 2023
Click here to see the original article in the Manchester Journal
“Renegade for Justice: Defending the defenseless in an outlaw world” by Stephen Lee Saltonstall; Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2022.
The title of this book goes a long way toward explaining its outlook and content. Saltonstall is a lifelong civil libertarian who, as he explains, has as his mission the promotion of individual liberties, free speech and equal justice for all. Having set out in the book’s opening chapters to outline his background and explain the choice he made to become a criminal defender, he uses the remaining ones to offer a case-by-case account of how he put his career to work in the service of his values. The result is a fascinating look at what it takes in today’s world to be effective in pursuit of the public good.
“Renegade for Justice” opens in the social hothouse of the 1960s, in which social mores are changing, and civil rights and anti-war sentiment captured the hearts of many of the youth of the time. Finding his own way in this sweeping tide, Saltonstall explores these problems and devises a path for himself into the future, a path that would lead to criminal law.
The virtue of criminal defense, as the author explains it, is that it embodies his belief that justice is for all, even the destitute and ignored he has found along his path to awareness. Later, he expands on his view that all people are equal to include nature — birds, trees, wildlife — in his formula of universal fairness. In general, in Saltonstall’s view, the individual is prized and corporate and establishment forces, as well as errant social currents such as racism and intractable poverty, are seen as the source of the problems he has set out to relieve. These are not inherent difficulties, he points out, but reflect the way we as a population allow them to proceed unsolved.
Saltonstall portrays his particular vocation as that of an “activist lawyer” pursuing “values-based law,” and depicts criminal defense as the dark side of the legal profession, eschewed by white-shoe firms and others more concerned with routine matters than with, he would say, issues of justice and human values. Indeed, this suits the person he had long ago become, and the many cases he cites, some in great though necessary detail, admirably show that he rarely if ever abandons his North Star of equal justice for all. Some of the Vermont cases readers may recall are the protection of the Lamb Brook wilderness in Readsboro, and the defense of the free speech rights of Williamstown, Vermont, middle school student Zachary Guiles, as well as cases from the era of the Reagan-initiated War on Drugs. Cases from Shaftsbury, Manchester and Bennington all appear in the course of the text.
Saltonstall, long an attorney in Bennington and Manchester, began his career in Massachusetts, first in Boston, then in Pittsfield. When he moved to Vermont, he made the long commute to and from Pittsfield to a job as attorney at the state’s Department of Social Services. His connection to Massachusetts has long roots. Saltonstalls had graduated from Harvard in each generation since its first class in 1642; an early Saltonstall attorney had been one of the sole protesters against the witch trials at Salem, for which, as the author here recounts, he was suspected of being a witch himself. Such lessons are not lost on the Saltonstall of our era. The many cases he relates reveal the dangers of criminal defense both to its attorneys and its clients. Early in the book, he points out that it is a profession in which there is no room for error, as the result might be the incarceration of an innocent person. When he translates this concern to nature, it could be the loss of important habitat or of various species themselves. In the end, we need to see that whoever is at risk, we of our own species have taken charge; in such matters, Saltonstall asks us to adopt the responsible view.
Tom Fels is a curator and writer living in North Bennington.
Harvey A. Silverglate – Click here to see the original article in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly
“When Steve Saltonstall — more formally known as Stephen Lee Saltonstall — told me that he had just submitted to his publisher the typescript of a memoir of sorts covering his remarkable legal career, I excitedly asked him if he could send me a copy so that I would not have to wait for it to be formally published before reading it.
He complied. I read it and was enthralled. I had several reasons for wanting to review the book, and for wanting to do it for Lawyers Weekly.
In the first place, Saltonstall discusses his work with lawyers, and cases handled by lawyers, whom I know very well. He began his legal career in Boston, working for my close friend and former law partner Norman Zalkind, a fabled jury trial lawyer who Saltonstall says “is fabulous on his feet.”
Saltonstall also mentions the case of Susan Saxe, successfully handled by my then-law partner and still close friend Nancy Gertner (later a federal judge and currently a professor at Harvard Law School).
Second, I’m all too familiar with the cases discussed by Saltonstall as he and I started our careers in criminal defense and civil liberties at around the same time. Like Saltonstall, I am a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer who has seen the ugly underbelly of the criminal justice system.
Criminal defense work, as the author notes, “is honorable work, but many consider it morally suspect or even reprehensible… .” This contradiction is hard for some of us to understand, since the Constitution requires that every defendant enjoy the effective representation of counsel, and, further, a disturbingly high number of innocent defendants are charged even though, Saltonstall writes, “most … are guilty of something — even though their offenses usually aren’t as bad as the prosecution’s charges would suggest … .”
Saltonstall describes another phenomenon well known to criminal lawyers: waking up in the middle of the night thinking about a case and trying to figure out how to prevent the destruction of the life of a redeemable human being.
Yet all this being said, he ruminates on “the enduring mystery of why human beings are capable of horrible crimes.” This tension is well known to the criminal defense bar, but Saltonstall put it into stark and direct terms.
One of the more interesting things about this memoir is that it is written by the scion of one of the nation’s most illustrious families. Saltonstall’s ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in the early 17th century. The prodigious Saltonstall family tree includes notable judges and politicians, such as Nathaniel Saltonstall, who was a judge during the Salem witch trials, and Leverett A. Saltonstall, who was the 55th governor of Massachusetts.
Steve Saltonstall has also become a significant member of his family tree, since he chose, as his subtitle suggests, to represent “the defenseless.”
Interestingly, Saltonstall discusses the career of another fabled Boston defense attorney, William “Bill” Homans Jr., who not only came from distinguished forebears but who also had a reputation for coming to the aid of the powerless and the underdog. Rather than enjoy the perquisites available to what we call “Yankees,” Homans, too, defended the “defenseless.”
Saltonstall’s career in Boston ended after a brief stint with the Prisoners’ Rights Project. He was not really cut out for city life, he observes, and he moved back to Vermont where he had lived before coming to Boston.
He had a similarly noteworthy (and improbable for a Yankee) career in Vermont, representing at one point Edwin A. Towne Jr., who had been designated a “dangerous special offender.” Saltonstall agreed to represent this enormously unpopular defendant at the request of a friend who began the representation but became burned out.
One has the impression that the author was involved in just about every highly controversial, indeed incendiary, issue of the era. Saltonstall was deemed an accessory to murder by anti-abortion activists. He was active in combatting the so-called “war on drugs” and argued vigorously for the legalization of marijuana, a very unpopular position back then since marijuana was known as “the killer weed.”
He did not shirk other more avowedly political cases, such as his opposition to what many deemed dangerous nuclear power plants.
My admiration for Saltonstall increased when I went to the chapter describing his representation of a public school student for violation of a school dress code. The student insisted on wearing a T-shirt describing then-President George W. Bush as a “Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief,” a draft dodger, a drunk and a drug addict. Saltonstall took the case up to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and eventually won on First Amendment grounds.
Saltonstall’s memoir ends on a sad note. He reports in his epilogue that he has finally retired because of the onset of Parkinson’s disease at the age of 70.
He left Vermont and moved with his wife to Tucson, Arizona. He ruminates about his career that began as a sort of rebellion against the elitism that he was born to and that rubbed him the wrong way for the first time when he was a student at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. But Exeter was no match for this particular renegade.
By the end of the book, one understands Saltonstall’s words from the preface: “I hope my stories will challenge those of you — you know who you are, you who dream of soft landings in the glittering halls of boring, soul-free law firms doing the bidding of the uber-rich and powerful — to visualize the alternative, a career that’s built on cases and causes that further the public interest, human rights, and care of the natural world.””
Jonathan M. Block, retired environmental lawyer, Sausalito, California.
“This book is part of a long tradition of attorneys recounting tribulations and great trials. As an attorney who had the privilege of working with Mr. Saltonstall, I know first hand that where this book differs from many others–Darrow, Spence, Kunstler–is in the modesty and dead-on accuracy Mr. Saltonstall displays concerning his many outstanding legal accomplishments. This is a great gift for any aspiring lawyer. If this country’s law schools turned out attorneys of the caliber and social conscience of Stephen Lee Saltonstall the moral fiber of America would be truly fortified.”
Peter de Lissovoy, author of “The Great Pool Jump,” a book which chronicles his experiences as a civil rights activist in the American South in the 1960s.
“Five stars for this great read, a fast-paced, colorful, closely observed portrait of the gritty and astonishing life flowing through a vital American institution, the common courts, written in a high style, full of wit, humor, irony, and wisdom. In vividly recalling his career in the judicial systems of Massachusetts and Vermont, Saltonstall has written a narrative that has the marks of a classic of American documentary art. Apparently temperamentally unfit for a more rarefied law practice that his family connections would have offered him, Steve Saltonstall pursued a life’s adventure representing ordinary people, good causes, animals and the environment, and sometimes the cursed and doomed, who also must have their day in court, and lived to tell about it in this memoir reminiscent of the documentary work of Wiseman and James Agee.
The case law and the ways in which the author explores and applies it at crucial moments are explained with a transparency that will please both the professional and the lay reader and that reveals the law as far from a dead letter, in spite of how some dour or political judges attached it to their purposes, but alive and supple in the hands of a creative practitioner. The chapters on the author’s successful legal fights against clear-cutting and roadbuilding in a Vermont wilderness alive with migratory songbirds and a prime black bear feeding grounds are especially moving, informative, and outrageous. The portraits of judges and advocates, officials and politicians, policemen and defendants in their encounters, turf battles, showdowns, high jinks, and go-along behavior take on a Dickensian cast.
The author names names too, some of which are well known, such as a third Bulger brother. This reader (from next door New Hampshire) got a different feel for Vermont culture and society and some of the state’s personages, a whole cast of characters who have to be read about to be believed. What grips the reader and fills the pages with tension is the purpose that instilled the author’s career—the uncompromising pursuit of justice in a world in which we fear it has ceased to exist, except when paid lip service to, even as an ideal.”
Laura Wilson, Public Defender, Guildhall, Vermont.
“As a public defender (also in Vermont!), I’ve read my share of memoirs by criminal defense attorneys. They come and go, but this one will stay with me forever. Author Steve Saltonstall has spent a lifetime fighting for justice in so many ways, including a long, proud career as a public defender in Vermont and Massachusetts. We PDs face all-too frequent defeats in a system often stacked against the accused and clients with tragic life stories stemming from poverty, mental health struggles, and substance abuse. It’s not always easy to keep one’s chin up, but Mr. Saltonstall’s book shines a bright light for me, and I’m grateful.
The book inspires and rejuvenates, but does so without romanticism or demonization. I highly recommend it: well-written, concise, funny, insightful, and an inspiration to public defenders like me and also activists everywhere. So glad he wrote and published this!”
Bill Newman, Lawyer, Radio Personality, and author of the book “When the War Came Home,” Northampton, Massachusetts.
“There was a time not so very long ago when the law’s promise of equal protection and due process — justice writ large — was a beacon for social justice warriors. Steve Saltonstall joined that crusade and, indeed, since the mid-1970s often has been a leader and one of its unsung heroes.
One cost for him was giving up the life of privilege that his surname guaranteed him. (One of my favorite parts of this memoir: how Steve got thrown out of a prestigious prep school for displaying a peace sign.)
Saltonstall tells his stories of trials and tribulations with joy and humor, heartbreak, pathos and perspective. The reader cannot wait to turn the pages because the stories – about murder cases and the death penalty and students who dared to use their First Amendment rights to speak out , among others — are that compelling. You will care a lot about the people Steve represents.
Their stories show how the law can be used to protect and enhance freedom. They also put in sharp relief how judges with questionable judgement and prosecutors without remorse often can, and do, abuse their positions of power, and how the law and legislators who make the law often fail us.
As an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts for the past 35 years, I appreciate how the author seamlessly weaves together all-too-human stories with the criminal and civil law that irrevocably changes those people’s lives. It is a book of courage and passion that demands your attention. In the end, Saltonstall makes us appreciate the human spirit that won’t back down.”
R. Keith Stroup, founder of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
“Stephen Saltonstall was born into a Boston Brahmin family of privilege, wealth and upper-class status that would have assured him a special, protected lifestyle surrounded by those of similar privilege. But he spent his entire life rejecting those inherited advantages and working for the poor, the underprivileged, and the downtrodden. He is an erudite, brilliant man who discovered early in life that his emotional satisfaction was derived primarily from identifying with those less fortunate.”
Mark S. Brodin, Boston University Professor of Law and author of the biography “William P. Homans, a Life in Court.”
“Boston has a tight-knit cadre of activist lawyers going back to the founding of the republic and before. Stephen Saltonstall stands in the tradition with figures like James Otis, who courageously challenged the legality of the king’s despised wits of assistance, setting the stage for the later adoption of the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Saltonstall movingly shares with his readers his own journey, with all its ups and downs — his fascinating cases, his clients, his fellow lawyers in the struggles for social justice, and the unforgettable characters he encountered along the way. It is an inspirational tale for law students, lawyers, and those seeking a more just society.”