Good afternoon. I'm Jim Collins; I'm one of the lawyers from Webster Street, and I've known Steve thirty years or more, practiced law together. One of the things about Steve that I have told an awful lot of people, but I would never dare tell him, was he may be the smartest person I have ever met. The last thing you'd want to do is tell him that. The fact is you could talk to Steve about all kinds of things. All the lawyers here who practice criminal law know how smart he was when it came to the practice of criminal law. But you could talk to Steve about books, about movies, about sports. You could talk to him about history. You didn't really want to talk to him about politics, but you could. He was knowledgeable, so knowledgeable on all those subjects, it was amazing.
The fact is, one of his characteristics that stands out to me, is Steve never, that I can remember, got mad. Might get agitated; I'll get to that in a second. But he never got mad. He was always calm; he was always thoughtful. The agitation, though, was something that some of us at the office could create. For instance, Steve, hard to believe, hated, really couldn't stand looking at really horrible crime scene pictures of bodies, just ghastly photographs, he hated looking at them. You would think that's crazy, conisdering how many murder cases he did, how many he second-chaired for Doug Schmidt, myself, Michael Gaines. Hated them. So what Schmidt and I and Winslow would do periodically is Steve had a ritual. When he came into the office in the morning, when he got into his office, he would open his middle drawer, and he'd put his wallet in there and close it. Then when he'd go to lunch, he would always go to the bathroom, and then wash his hands and come out, and get the wallet out of the middle drawer. Well once in a while, we would pick some of the most ghastly pictures you ever saw, and once he went to the bathroom, we'd sneak into his office, open the door, and put it right on top of the wallet. Then we'd go into my office, and we'd pretend like I'm talking business, and when he'd come out of the bathroom, "Come on Steve, we're going to lunch." Well he'd go into his office, he'd open, and you would hear something. It would be an "Anh!" or some sort of noise like "Oh my god." And we would start laughing like kids in high school. And that's really what we were. Steve would come in and he was agitated and he would see us laughing and he'd say, "Winslow," or Schmidt, Collins, and then he'd start laughing.
The times at Webster Street - The other thing you could do to Steve, I have to tell you this. Those of you who know Steve, his desk had to be perfect. Everything had to be absolutely straight. You couldn't move. So what you would do, when you were talking to him his computer was to the left. When he'd turn away you'd just move his books just a bit. And he'd turn back and he'd look at it, and he'd straighten it. I got to three times before he realized I did it. And he'd get agitated and he would laugh. We had an awful lot of those laughs at Webster Street. We had a great time over at Webster Street.
One of the things about Steve is he was really wonderful to work with on a serious trial. Unlike most criminal lawyers, and I include all of you here, he really didn't have a big ego involved in the trial of the case. He could sit there with you and not really want to get up there and do the cross because he could do it better, like probably most of us would. He was really wonderful to work with because he was always calm, always thoughtful, he always, I like maybe many of you when questions would come out from the jury it was oh my god, I've lost. And he would be, "You don't know what they're thinking." He was always calm. A great example, we were trying a case, and it was an insanity defense, and we're putting on a psychiatrist, guy had great credentials, he was the head of the school of psychiatry at Langley Porter [the psychiatric hospital at UCSF]. And he was on our side. These amazing credentials, but he had never ever testified in court. And so we had him prepared, and we go in there very nervous, and I start questioning him, and all of a sudden I'm realizing, "Boy this guy is really good. He's really good." and I look down and Steve's written a big note: "He's great! Keep him talking!" So I keep going, and I realize, I'm done. I lean down to Steve after a moment and I say "I got nothing else" and he says "Keep him talking" and I say "What am I going to say?" So he says, he gives me a question, as I stand up to ask the question, he starts writing in big print, questions for me to go, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, the ventriloquist wrote the questions, the dummy asked them, and it worked perfectly. And that was a perfect example of working with Steve. Because the witness was great; I was good; but all because of the brains of Steve, sitting there, without that ego and willing to work with you. He was just wonderful to work with.
You could go on telling Webster Street stories and talking about the law and Steve, because we all know how smart he was. But you know, to me what's more important is somebody, especially when we come to the end, it's not how good a lawyer you are. It's what kind of a person you are. And those of you who know Steve know, he cared about people. He really cared about people. He cared about his friends. He loved his sister Judith. He loved Jean, who left us way too soon, and he adored and was so proud and so proud and so loved Rachel. And the last few years Dale and the two grandsons. It was just wonderful. And to me as I say at the end it's not really about whether you're a good lawyer or not, it's what kind of person you are, and to me, to me, Steve Scherr was a really wonderful, good human being, and to me that's the highest compliment I could pay anybody. And I'm going to miss him.
No comments:
Post a Comment