Johnnie Cochran - ICONIC Defender

As a young boy runs thru the streets of Shreveport, Louisiana, an elderly woman in the neighborhood yells out,” Lil Johnnie be sure and pay attention to the traffic”. As Johnnie continued to grow and evolved, those words stayed with him. It was the catalyst to who he would become and the mark he would leave on the world.

Johnnie Cochran Jr.,was born October 2, 1937, in Shreveport, Louisiana, as the great-grandson of an African-American slave. He grew up in a stable and prosperous family, with a father and mother who stressed education, independence, and a color-blind attitude. While Cochran was still young, the family moved to Los Angeles, and he attended public schools there, earning excellent grades.

Although his father had a good job with the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company, Cochran always managed to find friends who had more money and more luxuries than he did.

"If you were a person who integrated well, as I was, you got to go to people's houses and envision another life," he recalled in The American Lawyer. "I knew kids who had things I could only dream of. I remember going to someone's house and seeing a swimming pool. I was like, `That's great!' Another guy had an archery range in his loft. An archery range! I could not believe it. I had never thought about archery! But it made me get off my butt and say, `Hey, I can do this!'

Cochran earned a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1959, supporting himself by selling insurance policies for his father's company. He was accepted by the Loyola Marymount University School of Law and began his studies there in the autumn of 1959. "I was the kind of student that didn't want to look like a jerk, always raising my hand," Cochran recalled in The American Lawyer. "But I would sit there and pray that I would be called on. That was my competitive spirit lying in wait."

Having finished his law studies and passed the California bar by 1963, Cochran took a job with the city of Los Angeles, serving as a deputy city attorney in the criminal division. There he worked as a prosecutor. In 1965, he entered private practice with the late Gerald Lenoir, a well-known local criminal lawyer. After a short period with Lenoir, he formed his own firm, Cochran, Atkins & Evans. Cochran's career was launched from this office with a highly-publicized and inflammatory case.

In May of 1966, a young black man named Leonard Deadwyler was shot dead by police as he tried to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital. Cochran represented Deadwyler's family, who accused the police of needless brutality in their son's murder. The Los Angeles Police Department insisted that the officers had acted in self-defense.

"To me, this was clearly a bad shooting," Cochran maintained in The American Lawyer. "But the [district attorney] did not file charges, and when our firm filed a civil suit we lost. Those were extremely difficult cases to win in those days. But what Deadwyler confirmed for me was that this issue of police abuse really galvanized the minority community. It taught me that these cases could really get attention."

Such headline-grabbing cases quickly made Cochran's name among the black community in Los Angeles, and by the late 1970s he was handling a number of police brutality and other criminal cases. In an abrupt about-face in 1978, however, he joined the Los Angeles County district attorney's office. Cochran has said that he took the job because he wanted to broaden his political contacts and refashion his image. "In those days, if you were a criminal defense lawyer, even though you might be very good, you were not considered one of the good guys, one of the very top rung," he explained in The American Lawyer.

Cochran's position at the district attorney's office did not spare him a brush with racist police. One afternoon as he drove his two young daughters across town in his Rolls Royce, he was pulled over. The police yelled at him to get out of the car with his hands up, and when he did he could see that they had drawn their guns. "Well, talk about an illegal search and seizure!" Cochran exclaimed in The American Lawyer, recalling the event. "These guys just go through ripping through my bag. Suddenly this cop goes gray. He sees my number three badge from the D.A.'s office! He's like, `Ahh! Ahh!' They all go apoplectic. I never got stopped again, but I'm careful not to make any weird moves. I might get shot!"

Returning to private practice in 1983, Cochran established himself as "the best in the West," to quote Ebony magazine. One of his first major victories occurred in the case of Ron Settles, a college football player who police said had hanged himself in a jail cell after having been picked up for speeding. On the behalf of Settles' family, Cochran demanded that the athlete's body be exhumed and examined. A coroner determined that Settles had been strangled by a police choke hold. A pre-trial settlement brought the grieving family $760,000.

As Cochran's fame grew, his client list began to include more celebrities, of which pop singer Michael Jackson is the best known. On Jackson's behalf, Cochran arranged an out-of-court settlement with a boy who had accused the singer of molestation. Cochran had the case retired in such a way that the charges against Jackson were withdrawn, and Jackson could publicly proclaim his complete innocence. Cochran also engineered an acquittal for Different Strokes star Todd Bridges, who stood accused of attempted murder.

No celebrity trial was more followed than O. J. Simpson's trial, however. In the summer of 1994, Simpson was arrested and charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. Simpson declared that he was innocent, and he engaged Cochran as part of an expensive "dream team" of lawyers dedicated to his defense. Before long, Cochran had replaced Robert Shapiro as leader of the "dream team" as the matter was brought to trial.

Calling the O. J. Simpson trial a "classic rush-to-judgment case," Cochran vowed to win an acquittal for the football star-turned-television celebrity. Responding to questions about the nickname for his legal team, Cochran told Time: "We certainly don't refer to ourselves as the Dream Team. We're just a collection of lawyers just trying to do the best we can."

After handling the post-trial publicity, Cochran returned to other cases, including civil litigation against Simpson, which forced the ex-football star to pay a hefty settlement to the Brown and Goldman families. The trial has had its impact on Cochran's life.

Cochran created The Cochran Firm, one of the largest personal injury law firms in America. Sadly, Cochran died of a brain tumor on March 29, 2005 at the age of 67. Even after his untimely passing, Johnnie Cochran is still considered one of the most brilliant lawyers to ever try a complicated and challenging case. That makes him a ICON!

Rest In Peace Johnnie Cochran!