Richard "Racehorse" Haynes,
Prominent Texas Defeense Attorney
OWNER'S SPOTLIGHT:
Reprinted in part from Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, October 31, 1978.

"There's nobody I couldn't defend," he says. "If I'd been Mr. Nixon's lawyer, the man would still be in office today."
    Mr. Haynes' beginnings were humble. He was born and raised poor, the son of a San Antonio, Texas, plasterer. He was schooled in blue- collar North Houston, and worked summers in the oil fields before winning a scholarship to the University of Houston. College was interrupted twice by military service, first in the Navy, where he was decorated for heroics at Iwo Jima, then as an Army paratrooper. He graduated from Bates College of Law in 1956, and, shunning the usual tour of duty as a prosecutor, set himself up in private practice immediately. "I think it's part of his ego he has to do everything just a little differently," says Naomi Haynes, his wife of 27 years and the mother of their four children.

    There have been a few cases where Mr. Haynes's best wasn't enough, most memorably the bribery-conspiracy trial of Texas Speaker of the House Gus Mutscher. The legislator was convicted in 1972 of receiving bank loans and stock deals in exchange for helping pass certain bills.
    The defense decided not to present any witnesses of its own in that case, a decision that Mr. Haynes admits was a legal gamble. "We were wrong," Mr. Haynes says sadly.
    A Haynes defense only rarely rests on one point of law or a single proof of a client's innocence. Says one Houston prosecutor, "He develops several scenarios simultaneously, and when it gets to final arguments, he picks the one he thinks will work."
    Mr. Haynes summed up this defense strategy before a recent American Bar Association seminar in New York. "Say you sue me because you say my dog bit you," he told them, bolstering his thumbs in his vest pockets. "Well, now this is my defense: My dog doesn't bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don't believe you really got bit. And fourth" he grins slyly "I don't have a dog."

n a small white courtroom- in Fort Worth, Texas, defense attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes is tearing at the testimony of a shaking witness like an errant hunt dog at a chicken.
    Teeth clenched, jaw jutted, eyes hot ahead, he spits 15 questions a minute at the man quarried in the witness box: "What time was that? You don't rightly remember? Morning? Evening? What did you do next? You can't recall? Did you go home? Back to work? Go visit someone? Who? What time was that?" In a cracked voice, the man, the state's key witness in the case, confesses he is confused about the events in question.
    "Racehorse" Haynes so named by his high-school football coach for his motions on the field is one of the most successful and expensive defense attorneys in America. At 50, his dashing courtroom style and impressive track record against long odds have already classed him with champion defense lawyers such as Percy Foreman, F. Lee Bailey and Edward Bennett Williams. And in a branch of the profession that rests heavily on notoriety, Mr. Haynes has recently pulled lengths ahead of his famous colleagues, and is believed by many to be America's premiere criminal defender.
    Like his hero, Mr. Foreman, Mr. Haynes is touted for his lurid murder defenses, especially those involving very rich clients on the one side and very condemning evidence on the other. In a 1969 case that became the subject of the bestseller "Blood and Money," Mr. Haynes successfully defended John Hill, a Houston plastic surgeon accused of murdering his socialite wife by letting her die after she ate allegedly poisioned French pastries that he served her.
    Last year, the Houston attorney further boosted his reputation by defending Fort Worth oil man T. Cullen Davis, the richest man in the country ever brought to trial for murder. Mr. Davis was charged with a shooting spree in his family's $6 million mansion that left his 12-year-old stepdaughter and his wife's lover dead, his estranged wife seriously wounded, and a family friend crippled. After the longest  murder trial in Texas history  12 weeks of testimony  during  which  three 

eyewitnesses named Mr. Davis as the man with the gun the jury returned a verdict of innocent in only four hours.
    He also likes money. Although he won't divulge his case fee, Mr. Haynes was rumored to have been paid a million dollars for the exhaustive defense of Cullen Davis last year, and to be commanding a similar fee in the newest Davis case.

    "The reason Haynes is the best lawyer money can buy," says one admiring Texas attorney, "is because he does his own detective work, he picks his juries real careful-like, and he isn't too damned pin-striped to take a wild- fool risk now and again." "A jury is like a computer all 12 components working together, the thing has an average I.Q. of 1,200 and 400 years or more of living experience," Mr. Haynes says- "It's scanning all the time, observing all the time, and it is sworn to pay attention. It is a formidable machine."

    But it is a machine with emotions that Mr. Haynes isn't afraid to tinker with in order to steer it his way. He uses staging and theatrics to keep the jury interested and alert, reenacting events with wit- nesses, demonstrating the murder weapon in the courtroom, and skillfully mimicking uncooperative or damaging witnesses. Once, during closing arguments, Mr. Haynes cross-examined a key witness that the prosecution had refused to call by addressing pointed questions to an empty witness chair. His questions were so demanding of answers that 10 jurors voted to, acquit his client.

    Mr. Haynes is as deliberately daring when court adjourns. He drives his silver Porsche Turbo Carerra and silver Excalibur too fast, flies his own Cessna, sky dives, dirt-races eight motorcycles, and sails in the Gulf of Mexico on a sleek 40-foot yacht.
    He is unexpectedly short, built like a law casebook, square and thick. But he is the height of attention when he hurries into the courtroom in his exactly cut suits  and anteater-skin boots a small man hugely proud of himself.