James C. Rinaman Jr.
One June 2, Jim Rinaman marked 50 years of service to the Marks Gray firm in Jacksonville. Rinaman earned his bachelor’s degree in 1955 from the University of Florida and received his L.L.B. in 1960. His career has been with Marks Gray. He served as president of The Jacksonville Bar Association as well as The Florida Bar, the Florida Defense Lawyers Association, and the Association of Defense Trial Lawyers. Rinaman wrote a series of columns about the practice of law. The second is today and the others will follow throughout the coming weeks. This is part two of four.
No one kept time sheets. Civil cases were billed at the conclusion of the matter, for insurance defense work at $35 an hour. If the case went on for several years and the file was three feet thick, you would reorganize the correspondence and pleadings and dictate a long narrative series of events which might go on for two or three pages, estimate the number of hours, and multiply by $35, which might produce a bottom line of $3,500 or $35,000. If the client thought the bill was too high, he would call to ask about it and you would say “Well, what do you think the bill ought to be?” and he would tell you, and you would change the bill accordingly. I do not recall any client calling to say the bill was too low.
Legal Aid was performed by a committee. Ike Butler, our part- time Legal Aid Director, would call the committee together at his office in the Financial News & Daily Record building at which legal aid requests were reviewed and parceled out to committee members to handle. Later, we had an office in the basement of the Atlantic Bank, across the street from the present Legal Aid office on Forsyth Street, run by our new Legal Aid Director, Bill Tomlinson. In 1971, when I was General Counsel of the city, I assigned one of my young lawyers, Paul Doyle, to go to a one-week seminar in Washington, D.C., on public housing because we were having difficulties with public housing and we needed someone who knew that law.
The week after Paul returned from the seminar, much to my chagrin, he told me that he was leaving to become the first full-time director for Jacksonville Legal Aid. We managed to handle the housing problems without him, and Paul went on to become a legendary figure in development of legal aid in Jacksonville and Florida.
The Jacksonville Bar Association was founded in 1897, and in the 1970s we had a ribald tradition of roasting candidates for office in the association in nominating speeches at the annual meeting - Ed Gay, Ray Ehrlich, Tom Tygart and Mattox Hair were the Hank Coxes of that era. I ran for office in the association three times, and each time Tom Tygart nominated my law partner Mattox Hair against me, but to no avail.
We had no public defenders until after 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gideon vs. Wainwright that those accused of a felony had an absolute right to counsel, which in 1972 was applied to misdemeanors in another Florida case, Argesinger v. Hamlin.
In the early ‘60s, because there were no Federal public defenders, U.S. District Judge Bryan (Cowboy) Simpson would call six or eight young lawyers to his courtroom on arraignment day to assign them to defend anyone without counsel. On one occasion, I was assigned to defend an 18-year-old man who had driven a Chrysler Imperial owned by a notorious moonshiner, “Rastus.”
When Rastus was arraigned he pled not guilty, and told the court that his lawyer, Wayne Ripley, was not able to attend court that day. When his driver was arraigned, he pled guilty. Rastus jumped up and whispered in his ear, after which the young man said, “I change my plea to not guilty,” whereupon the U.S. attorney objected to the change of plea and the conduct of Rastus. Judge Simpson leaned over the bench and said, “Well, the young man has a right to counsel, and Rastus is an older and wiser head in these matters.” I was able to get the young man a suspended sentence and probation as a first offender.
On another occasion, I was assigned to defend two teenagers and an older man accused of breaking and entering the Mandarin post office and stealing stamps from the small safe, which had been opened with an ax. The men were apprehended because the constable in Mandarin had seen a strange automobile with Sarasota County license plates in the area and wrote down the number. The car was traced to one of the young men, and the stamps were found in condoms buried in the outdoor privy behind his house. The older man would not talk to me, so I obtained permission to represent only the younger men, who then testified against him. He had lived in Mandarin previously and was the only one among them who knew about the post office and the stamps. He was convicted, but I got the young men suspended sentences and probation as first offenders.