California Brain Injury Lawyers

Nichols Case May Be Toughest Yet For California Defense Lawyer

Although a left-wing student radical in the 1960s, Tigar's clients have spanned the ideological spectrum: African-American militant Angela Davis, activist H. Rap Brown, former Texas Gov. John Connally and John Demjanjuk, the alleged Nazi war criminal known as "Ivan the Terrible."

Tigar was a law professor at the University of Texas when U.S. District Judge David Russell of Oklahoma City asked him to defend Nichols. Several Oklahoma lawyers had disqualified themselves, because they knew bombing victims or their families.

Born in Glendale, California, Tigar grew up in Burbank and the San Fernando Valley. He went to public schools and the University of California at Berkeley, earning a bachelor's degree in political science in 1962 and law degree in 1966.

Defending unpopular defendants can have unpleasant consequences.

He defended Davis while a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. He told the Post that at the time, California Gov. Ronald Reagan persistently urged the state Board of Regents to fire him.

Davis, a left-leaning political activist, was acquitted in 1972 of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy after being accused of aiding an attempted courtroom escape that killed four people.

"I've tried to make representing people who would not otherwise have counsel the center of my law practice," Tigar explained.

"And to stress not just the right of every person to counsel, but to raise issues about how the government treats people that it suspects of having done something wrong. I think that's the most important thing that a lawyer can do, and I've been lucky enough to be involved in cases where those issues were right at the surface."

Other members of the defense team include:

Ronald Woods: He is a former U.S. attorney for the southern district of Texas.

N. Reid Neureiter: He graduated in 1993 from the University of Texas School of Law, where he was one of Tigar's students.

Adam Thurschwell: He has a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jane Tigar: She is Tigar's wife, who began working voluntarily on the Nichols case as a law student at Columbia.

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