Whenever civil disobedience is in the air, a select group of Bay Area lawyers who believe they are carrying the progressive mantle of Eugene Debs and William Kunstler drop some of their work and heed a cell phone call to arms.

This weekend, they had cause to celebrate.

After countless unpaid hours defending most of the Bay Area's anti-war protesters, San Francisco members of the National Lawyers Guild declared a partial victory after cases against 407 protesters were dismissed Friday. Prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to obtain convictions in the cases, mostly related to blocking city streets.

The guild's hardball tactics -- including the threat of clogging San Francisco's traffic court with infraction cases at taxpayers' expense if those cases were prosecuted -- appeared to have succeeded.

``The strategy was to make so much work for the district attorney's office that they would realize the error of their ways, and would simply get rid of the prosecutions. And ultimately, that's what happened,'' said attorney Bobbie Stein, a longtime guild member who is confident the other 1,900 pending cases in San Francisco will have a similar resolution.

Dozens of other such cases in Santa Clara and Alameda counties are being represented by guild lawyers as well.

``I hope the message is that if the police feel they need to clear the street, they do so respectfully, and that the district attorney doesn't prosecute people for simply exercising their First Amendment rights,'' said the 45-year-old Stein.

Mark McNamara, spokesman for San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, disagreed with Stein's view.

``We weren't prosecuting people on the basis of their First Amendment rights,'' said McNamara on Sunday. ``We were prosecuting them -- at least in some cases -- because they were trying to shut down the city. It had nothing to do with their First Amendment rights. We respect those rights, but there is finally a penalty that one has to pay when you exercise your First Amendment rights and try and shut down a city.''

This isn't the first time that Stein, a San Francisco-based criminal defense attorney and instructor at Boalt Hall School of Law, has been involved in such an event. And it won't be the last.

Formed in 1937

``As long as they will keep prosecuting people, then we will keep defending them,'' said Stein, who has been a guild member for 23 years.

Formed in 1937, the National Lawyers Guild has been advocating nationally for free speech, civil rights and other political issues since the New Deal.

The guild has fought everything from McCarthyism to the Vietnam War. Now, with more than 6,000 members -- its largest contingent of 850 volunteer attorneys is in the Bay Area -- the guild is fighting the U.S. Patriot Act and the war on Iraq.

``When the Klan comes to town, the ACLU represents the Klan members and we represent the counter-demonstrators,'' Zachary Wolfe, a national vice president, said half-jokingly.

Locally, guild members range from high-priced, well-regarded veteran trial lawyers such as Dan Barton in Palo Alto to John Viola, a 32-year-old San Francisco attorney who mainly defends homeless people against citations -- so much so he has earned the nickname ``Mr. Infraction.''

Yet the two share a similar philosophy about the controversial civil disobedience actions during the war protests.

``This is a war which millions of people opposed, and their opposition had almost no effect,'' said Viola of the 2,300 protesters arrested in San Francisco on March 20 and 21. ``So they took the streets as the last vestige of traditional democracy. For that, some of these people were jailed and detained.''

Said Barton: ``In these political times, dissent is becoming more and more suspect, and people who question the war and the executive branch are being treated like criminals.''

Barton's cases in the South Bay are fewer -- about 52 clients are being arraigned during the next few weeks. And they are different from Viola's because, unlike the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, Santa Clara County prosecutors have so far refused to reduce the protesters' charges from misdemeanors to infractions.

`A different world'

``Santa Clara County is a different world,'' Barton said.

Guild lawyers aren't strangers to local law enforcement authorities.

Months before the San Francisco anti-war protests, Stein was holding protest law seminars for inexperienced attorneys to teach them how to defend protesters. Mark Vermeulen, another guild member, was negotiating the rules of engagement with the San Francisco Police Department before the demonstrations.

In Santa Clara County, guild member and San Jose attorney Dan Mayfield, along with a group of protesters, met with the Sunnyvale police days before the April 22 action in front of Lockheed Martin's facility to review plans.

Defense mode

Now, however, they're in strict defense mode -- communicating with their defendants through Web sites and e-mail groups.

The guild has always inspired anger and admiration.

Visitors to the guild's Web site can buy $15 T-shirts printed with a quote from the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saying, ``The National Lawyers Guild is worse than the people throwing bombs.''

These days, much of the reaction to the NLG -- both good and bad -- bubbles out of San Francisco, where guild lawyers have been defending thousands of protesters by fighting $100 fines with every legal maneuver they could muster.

At the same time, they were appealing to the citizens of a liberal city whose district attorney, Hallinan, is a former supervisor and protester during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Hallinan's spokesman McNamara defended his boss's insistence on prosecuting the protesters -- first on misdemeanor charges, then after Hallinan agreed to reduce the charges to infractions.

``There is no greater defender of First Amendment rights than Terence Hallinan,'' McNamara said. ``At the same time, he will not abide those protesters to put this city at risk.''

Stein said the district attorney's office underestimated the resolve of the protesters. ``People weren't just going to roll over and pay a fine -- even if it was $90 or $50,'' she said. ``People felt very strongly that they didn't do anything wrong.''

San Francisco Supervisor Tony Hall scoffs at the guild and its mission, calling it ``pathetic'' and ``sad.''

Hall, who has been demanding some financial recompense from the millions of dollars that the March protests cost the financially strapped city, said the lawyers have used misinformation and unethical legal tactics in their defense of the protesters.

``Destroying the economy of San Francisco and other parts of the country, that's the real mission of the National Lawyers Guild,'' Hall said. ``They know it costs a lot to prosecute these people and they want to make it tough. It's not playing within the rules.''

But Jeff Brand, dean of the University of San Francisco Law School, said the guild's work is part of an American tradition of those who have risked censure and unpopularity to defend the under-represented and protect American civil liberties.

Activist lawyers

``I think it's important to have an organization that challenges the legal establishment to make sure that it lives up to the ways of our Constitution,'' Brand said this week. ``During the '60s the guild influences in law schools helped inspire a generation of activist lawyers, including myself.''

The guild, whose members include such renowned civil rights attorneys as Arthur Kinoy and the late William Kunstler, is one of America's most politically active legal groups.

Copyright 2003 San Jose Mercury News

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