Attorney Vincent Hallinan, 95

October 04, 1992|By San Francisco Chronicle.

SAN FRANCISCO — Vincent Hallinan, the legendary San Francisco trial attorney who for seven decades battled in courtrooms in behalf of the Left, labor and the downtrodden, died of a heart attack Friday. He was 95.

Mr. Hallinan was the son of a San Francisco cable car gripman who paid him to memorize Irish poetry and instilled in his son the drive he used to become one of the nation`s most celebrated lawyers of the Left.

During his career, Mr. Hallinan served as the 1952 presidential candidate of the Progressive Party and amassed a multimillion-dollar fortune through personal injury settlements he won in the courts and the real estate investments of his wife, Vivian.

He received his law degree from St. Ignatius College, which later became the University of San Francisco. He began practicing law in 1919.

A pugnacious personality, Mr. Hallinan`s courtroom life included fiery exchanges with judges and at least seven citations for contempt of court.

Perhaps his most celebrated case was his defense of the waterfront labor leader Harry Bridges. The Australian-born Bridges was convicted of perjury in 1950 for swearing that he had not been a Communist when he took out citizenship papers years before, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that conviction.

That case earned Mr. Hallinan one of his contempt of court citations, for which he served a 5-month prison term.

He also served 2 years in prison for income tax evasion in the mid-1950s and was fined $50,000 by the Internal Revenue Service.

Referring to the handcuffs he wore when he was taken to McNeil Island prison in Washington state, Mr. Hallinan once said: ``I get more honor out of these than any other decoration.``

In the early 1960s, Mr. Hallinan-who described himself as ``a roaring atheist``-filed suit against the Roman Catholic Church over a contested will, challenging San Francisco Archbishop Joseph McGucken to answer questions about heaven and purgatory, among other things.

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld a Superior Court judge`s decision to throw the suit out of court.

He titled his 1963 memoirs ``A Lion in Court.``