Choices from p 13 with Maledon and Hurwitz in the practice that became Osborn Maledon. The three remained lifelong friends. Maledon still runs the firm. Hurwitz became an Arizona Supreme Court justice and now sits on the Ninth U.S.Circuit Court of Appeals. I spent 16 years covering courts and crime for the Arizona Republic and wrote for Phoenix New Times for eight years before that. During that time, Hammond was a regular source who became a friend. He always picked up his phone when he saw my number flash on the screen. I’d run into him at spring training or Diamondbacks games. He was a baseball fanatic with season tickets. He knew all the beer vendors and ushers, but no one was allowed to talk to him during the game, because he was busy with his scorecard. Occasionally, we would get a beer to talk about the state of legal affairs. He was an expert I consulted for many stories, though until now, he was never the story himself, nor would he want to be. I and our mutual friend, Dale Baich, find it hard to remember specific conversations with Hammond — which probably means he was doing more listening than talking. But there he was, testifying before Congress about capital cases, signing an op-ed piece in the Washington Post about impeachment, lecturing a law school class on lost cause appellate issues. What he was proudest of was founding the Arizona Justice Project, which offers legal help to lost causes, prisoners who proclaimed innocence but have exhausted the scant appeals and government-paid defense attorneys the system offers. “Larry thought there ought to be a place where people in prison can write for help,” said Lindsay Herf, executive director of the Arizona Justice Project. The Justice Project took the side of battered women who had been convicted for fighting back, arsonists convicted by faulty science, and defendants sentenced to decades in prison for a $20 rock of crack cocaine. “No matter how big or how little it was, Larry was always there,” said Katie Puzauskas, a director of The Justice Project. At the same time, Hammond took on cases at Osborn Maledon. “He was always worried that people’s rights were trampled on,” said Maledon. Hammond wanted to fight for them. “The firm gave him the resources to do it,” Maledon said. “Lots of resources.” Baich, a recently retired federal defender who specialized in death penalty cases, recalled Hammond commenting on a colleague who came across too strongly, like, he said, a shrill abolitionist. “He suggested a more toned-down, reasonable approach,” Baich said. “That was Larry: Be credible, be reasonable, and do not demonize the opposition.” We, as friends and colleagues, knew 14 Hammond had worked on Roe v. Wade. There were murmurs and rumors. We knew he had been a Watergate prosecutor. The connection to the Iran hostages caught me completely by surprise. He never talked about any of those cases, at least not to those who knew him in Phoenix. “All of us wish he had talked more,” Herf said. Some of it was the nature of clerking at the Supreme Court. “You understood from the first day that all of it was confidential,” Maledon said. In his later years, Hammond recalled his Watergate days, especially when former President Donald Trump was being impeached. And he was free to talk about his clerking days because Justice Powell lessons. The stuttering Texan was one of Black’s last projects. Black and a second justice, John Marshall Harlan II, resigned for health reasons in fall 1971, leaving two vacancies on the court. They both died that year, Black in September and Harlan in December. Hammond was left with a job but without a justice to clerk for. So, as he told Robenalt, he played a lot of basketball in the court above the Supreme Court building, jokingly referred to as “The Highest Court in the Land.” He gave tours to school groups and kibitzed with Justice 503,000 in 1972. There’s no way of knowing how many illegal abortions were conducted. Abortion was not contraception. It also was not theoretical. Or easy. It was a desperate act, and just because it was illegal in many places didn’t mean women didn’t risk their lives to do it. I knew one 19-year-old woman who was not prepared to have a child and was terri- fied to tell her parents she was pregnant. She sought out an abortionist who pierced her with a knitting needle and gave her medicine that would thin her blood until she miscarried. The miscar- riage took place while she was in the dorm room of the women’s college she attended in New Jersey. The dean of the school, at first, wouldn’t let the male paramedics onto the gated campus, and she nearly bled to death. She survived. But the school’s response was to have her expelled. That woman was my sister. A year later, she could have obtained a legal abortion in nearby New York. The New York State Legislature had passed what was then known as an “abortion on demand” law. Two years later, the legisla- ture voted to repeal it, but Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a Republican, vetoed the bill. Women flocked to New York for the Arizona Justice Project Phoenix attorney Larry Hammond. released his former clerks from the code of confidentiality. Hammond gave up talking about Roe v. Wade, however, after participating in a debate on the subject at Notre Dame University with soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. It became quite heated, according to James Robenalt, an attorney in Cleveland. “I decided I should plow other fields,” he told Robenalt. But Hammond did talk to Robenalt, in 2013, for a 2015 book the Cleveland lawyer wrote titled January 1973: Watergate, Roe v. Wade, Vietnam, and the Month That Changed America Forever. And Hammond’s memos and finger- prints are all over the archived papers of Justice Lewis Powell. Sex and the ’60s Hammond was born in El Paso, Texas, and he attended the University of Texas, where he majored in Russian, partly because he discovered that he did not stutter when he spoke foreign languages. He stayed in Texas for law school. The stutter may have played a part in his clerkship. He had strong academic credentials, of course, but Justice Hugo Black, in the last part of his career on the bench, started hiring clerks that he thought he could improve and teach life Thurgood Marshall. And, Hammond told Baich, he was fulfilling a death-bed wish of Justice Black — burning some of his papers. Then as now, the country was in turmoil. The late ’60s and early ’70s were a time of great political and social upheaval. “Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll” was not yet a cliche. “Generation gap” was the phrase coined to describe the debates and sometimes violent clashes between baby boomers and their parents, the self-named “Greatest Generation,” over nearly every- thing from haircuts and music to civil rights, the war in Vietnam, and whether the voting age should stay at 21. The sexual revolution was in full swing, but it was complicated. Birth control was not always an option. It was not always available and not always legal. In only 1965, the Supreme Court had knocked down laws prohibiting contraception, and then only for married couples. Birth control pills were not readily available until Nixon signed a family planning law in 1970, making them widely affordable. In 1972, abortion was available on demand in only four states, but three of those required that the patient live in-state. Thirty states prohibited abortion in any circumstances and 16 others set restrictions. Nonetheless, according to a study published in 2012 by the National Bureau of Economic Research, nearly 453,000 women had legal abortions in 1971 and procedure, and more than half of all legal abortions in the country were performed there in 1971 and 1972. In the latter year, 15,522 women just from the state of Michigan traveled to New York for abor- tions, and some doctors advertised package deals that included airfare, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research study. In the states that imposed restrictions on abortion, the laws varied. Some prohibited it altogether, while others allowed it in instances of rape, or to save the mother’s life. Some more ambiguously allowed abor- tion to preserve a woman’s health, but that was a matter of interpretation: Did it mean her physical health, or could it also mean her mental health? It was not as easy to get a doctor to vouch that a woman needed an abortion to preserve her health as it was for a man to get a doctor to diagnose bone spurs and spare him from being drafted into the military. The woman often had to pass muster with a hospital committee. The Abortion Rights Battles The legal precedents piled up. Numerous cases landed at the door of the Supreme Court, and in 1971, the court chose to hear Roe v. Wade. The case was filed under the pseud- onym of Jane Roe, an unmarried pregnant woman, who did not meet the life-saving medical requirements to get an abortion under Texas law. But it was actually two cases, with three plaintiffs besides Jane Roe in the Texas case and a separate case called Doe v. Bolton, which challenged abortion laws in Georgia. The court was in transition, however. It was short two justices. 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