David Terry for the Defense
Over the course of 40 years and nearly 1,300 jury trials (all but a handful of them wins), David Terry has committed his career to ensuring justice is served fairly to individuals accused of crimes.
Story by Dick Baltus Photos by Thomas Boyd
The vanity plates weren’t his idea; David Terry was not a vanity plate kind of guy.They weren’t even his, originally. They belonged to a colleague who had decided to auction them off at an attorneys’ conference Terrywas attending.
At the time, he was several years into his career as a Roseburg criminal defense attorney and riding a hot streak during which he had won all but a couple cases. His success had caught the attention of his attorney friends, who were now pressuring Terry to bid on the plates that read NT GLTY.
He wouldn’t, so they did, and that bold statement, which took onadded meaning later in his life, has graced Terry’s gray Toyota Tundra ever since.
“Initially, I was uneasy about having them,” Terry says. “But once the Feds tried to take me down, I have carried them with pride.”
There are worse things to be known as than the NT GLTY defense attorney, and for a few years Terry was known as one or two of them by a few individuals sporting federal badges and armed with ill intent.But with those “dark days” behind him, he now sounds mostly content and totally grateful for a rewarding career and the nearly 1,300 opportunities he’s had to convince juries to ensure justice was served fairly for his clients.
Terry was born in Denver to a journalist mother, Dorothy Jean, and clinical psychologist father, Jim. His family relocated to Roseburg in 1954 after Jim landed his first job at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. It was there he learned to hate clinical psychology and to love Roseburg.
By 1955, the Terrys had relocated to California’s San Fernando Valley, but their hearts never left the Umpqua Valley.
“We took one family vacation a year,” Terry recalls, “and for years my parents, two sisters and I would make the nine-hour drive to Steamboat Inn, where we’d always take Cabin 6.”
While his father was attracted by the flyfishing and opportunity to reconnect with the Steamboat Inn’s owners – Frank and Jeanne Moore, whom he had befriended while living in Roseburg – Terry was captivated by the adventures of youth.
“That’s where I drove a car for the first time, Frank’s ’47 Jeep Willys,” Terry says. “That’s where I shot a gun and kissed a girl for the first time. All my firsts happened at Steamboat.”
In 1968, Terry’s parents purchased property along the North Umpqua, where it bends away from then back to Highway 138, and built a house where the family moved after Terry completed his senior year of high school.
Jim Terry wanted his son to go to Harvard or, if not there, another private school in the East. It would not be there.Terry remembers mailing his application to Harvard on a Sunday and receiving a rejection letter only three days later. “It’s like they knew it was coming and were ready,” he quips.
Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Ct., was more welcoming. Terry chose the school, in part,for the opportunity to play football. He would join a team that included a fellow freshman named Bill Belichick, now coach of the New England Patriots.
Terry’s plan was to become a veterinarian, following in the footsteps of two uncles. But standing in his way were two major barriers called math and chemistry. One day after sophomore chemistry class, Terry’s teacher approached with a question.
In his retelling of the story, Terry adopts a gentle Southern drawl to play Miss Ruth Tyson’s role. “She said, ‘David I know you’ve got your heart set on being a veterinarian, but I’m not sure you understand that course is going to require a lot of science and a lot of math. Have you ever thought about doing something else?’”
Terry replied, “Well, when my mom and I used to argue, she’d get annoyed and tell me, You know David, you’d make a damn good lawyer.”
“David,” Miss Tyson responded, “I believe you would.”
“With literally no more thought than that,” Terry says, “I made the decision to be a lawyer.”
Terry was trying cases in Douglas County even before he had earned his law degree. After college, he moved back to the family home on the North Umpqua and took a job pulling green chain at Sun Studs while waiting to hear from the several law schools to which he had applied.
He finally learned he had been accepted to Willamette University the day before he was supposed to be on campus. After completing his second year, in 1977, he was eligible to try cases under the supervision of another lawyer,and Terry found his accomplice in Bill Laswell,then Douglas County’s district attorney.
“Terry remembers mailing his application to Harvard on Sunday and receiving a rejection letter only three days later. “It’s like they knew it was coming and were ready,” he quips.”
On the afternoon of his first day as an intern, he was trying his first case, guided less by his studies than his intimate familiarity with the courtroom tactics of a popular TV attorney.
“A group of us students watched Perry Mason all the time,” he says. “So I knew that, as the prosecuting attorney, I had to go first. And when I was done presenting my case, I knew I was supposed to say, ‘No further questions, your honor.’ I was pretty proud of myself.”
Terry took on 54 jury trials that summer, losing only two.
By the time he’d graduated from Willamette and passed the bar exam (on his second try),Terry already had developed something of a golden boy reputation. It was enough toland him a position in the Union County DA’s office in LaGrande in the summer of 1979. He wouldn’t make it to fall.
Early on, Terry landed a case in which two detectives had arrested a man after a search of his car turned up four pounds of cocaine.In their report, the detectives claimed the man had given consent to search. After they revealed to Terry on the day of the trial they had lied, he moved to dismiss the case — to the dismay of the judge — on the grounds they had violated the defendant’s rights, citing not only the law but also his ethical obligation.
Terry’s boss tried to fire him as soon as he returned to the DA’s office, but he was too late.“I told him I’d already quit as I was walking across the street,” Terry remembers.
He drove back to Roseburg, opened his private practice the next day, Aug. 5, 1979, and restarted his career – this time committed to defending the accused.
Terry’s career took off quickly. “I was winning, and I thought my life was set,” he says.
Little did he know, however, how little he knew about his profession. Terry remains forever grateful for the two friends who called that to his attention, retired attorneys, Jim Arneson and Tom Bernier.
“I met Tom and Jim about a year and a half into my practice. They were two unbelievably gifted and instinctive defense lawyers who basically did an intervention on me one Friday over burgers and drinks,” Terry says.
While praising Terry for his unique talent for communicating with juries, Arneson andBernier also called him out for relying too much on his natural gifts.“
They said, ‘You don’t understand the work you need to put in to truly advocate for a person accused of a crime,’” Terry remembers.“I went from thinking I knew everything to realizing I knew nothing. Those two instilled in me what it meant to truly carry the water for the unfortunate folks who end up on the wrong side of a criminal prosecution.”
Years later, Bernier has high praise for his friend and former colleague. “David’s a good talker, but he’s also got a very big heart,” he says. “He not only gives his clients emotional support through a case, but often times they are still calling him years later asking for his advice. There are lot of people walking around now who owe a huge debt of gratitude to David.”
Count among them the owner of First StrikeEnvironmental Co. and the families of eight firefighters killed in a head-on collision in Malheur County in August 2003. The company was indicted on 11 counts of reckless endangerment after initial blood tests showed alcohol levels in the firefighters well above the legal limit.
Terry all but moved his office into the company’s Roseburg headquarters and immersed himself in the case. His research turned up the results of a study of burn victims that showed fire had caused the sugar in their blood to ferment,producing blood alcohol levels that were wildly divergent and changed over time.
Terry successfully moved to have the FirstStrike firefighters’ blood retested and, when the results came back significantly different from the original levels, got the case dismissed.
In his nearly 30 years in practice, Richard Wesenberg has had a front-row seat for many of Terry’s legendary courtroom performances.
“David is a masterful trial lawyer, brilliant with juries,” says Wesenberg, now Douglas County’s district attorney. “It’s always a fascinating lesson to watch him at work.”
According to Wesenberg, in the courtroom“the only people David is talking to are the 12 individuals who comprise his jury. They are the only ones who matter to him because they decide his client’s fate.”
Wesenberg gives Terry credit for not shying away from the most serious or complex cases,which was never more apparent than when he agreed to represent an accused arsonist named Tammy Meredith. In 1998, Meredith was working as a fire protection officer for Tiller Ranger District when she was arrested on charges of starting a series of fires throughout the region.
“She was indicted on 34 counts of first-degree arson, but they only had evidence that she started two of them, and those were small fires that would have just gotten her probation,” Terry recalls.
Using evidence from 104 hours’ worth of dispatch tapes and 65 witnesses called over the course of a seven-week trial, Terry received a judgment for his client that was even less punitive than the plea bargain he had proposed— and the district attorney had scoffed at.
“She may have set all of those fires, but I knew the government couldn’t prove it. So I offered a reasonable plea bargain, but it was rejected,”Terry says. “I have represented plenty of people who were wrongfully accused but were the victims of an instantaneous conclusion that someone had drawn. Therefore, they felt they had to tailor their investigation to ratify their unfounded, unobjective belief that this person is guilty. But you’ve gotta do it by the book. People have to do their jobs.”
“He didn’t have a prayer of winning that one,”says Joan Seitz, the retired Douglas County judge who presided over the Meredith trial. “It was a very complex case, but he did a masterful job of creating reasonable doubt. Being a trial lawyer is an art form, really, and David is quite gifted at reading people and in telling stories. He does it artfully, carefully and theatrically.”
Larger than life is a phrase often ascribed to Terry, and his association with a like-minded client more than a decade ago almost cut him down to size.
Terry was representing, and sometimes socializing with, a local named Kent Jones who would wind up arrested (and ultimately convicted) on charges of leading a massive international drug ring.
Terry’s association with Jones earned him the suspicions of federal prosecutors and the epithet “Attorney A” in court documents and media reports, including a banner headline inThe News Review that read “Local Attorney Eyed in Federal Drug Probe.”
Despite not having a trace of evidence, the federal probe went on for years and costTerry $75,000 in attorney fees and untold emotional hardship.
“Imagine what that does to your life,” he says. “I was married, had kids in school. It was a nightmare. Ultimately, the matter just went away, but it certainly taught me some modesty.”
Which is not to say David Terry doesn’t still have a little vanity. But now it’s attached to the bumper of his truck, reminding him daily of all the times he’s won for people with so much to lose and the time he escaped that fate himself.
