Keeping the system honest

Criminal defense attorney Arthur Mathews '59 didn't learn his most valuable lesson about the American legal system in law school. He learned it on death row.

As Mathews waited futilely with his client, a convicted cop-killer named Wilbert Evans, for Gov. Douglas Wilder of Virginia to issue a stay of execution, the client told him, "Never trust a prosecutor."

"I'm a very strong believer in our adversarial system," Mathews says today from his office at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Wimer, Cutler & Tickering. "The defense has to push the government to its limit in every single case or else the government is going to start taking advantage of its power."

According to Mathews, before he took over the case, prosecutors delayed Evans's appeals for a new trial even though they had misrepresented his criminal history in the first trial. At the same time-although Evans had been sentenced to death-Virginia case law prohibited prosecutors from seeking the death penalty twice for the same defendant, requiring the defendant to be sentenced to life imprisonment. So Evans didn't believe the delays could hurt him.

Evans didn't know that while the prosecutors delayed his appeals, Virginia's assistant attorney general was drafting legislation that could change the established case law and allow a second death sentence at retrial. By the time Evans was able to appeal, the law had been changed and prosecutors were able to seek a second death sentence, even though Evans had been a model prisoner, saving the lives of several prison guards and preventing the rape of several prison nurses during an attempted jailbreak.

"If there's one thing we can learn from the O.J. Simpson trial, it's what the government will do to win a case," Mathews says. "If the defense hadn't pushed them, we never would have known about allegations of Mark Fuhrman planting false evidence in other cases during his career. I will defend almost anyone, no matter how guilty he is, so long as the defendant will follow my legal advice-just to keep the system honest."

Although he handles several pro bono cases each year, Mathews's clients usually come from corporate America. In 1992, Washingtonian magazine named him one of the fifty most sought after defense lawyers in the country. His client list includes Prudential Securities, the Iroquois pipeline partnership, many other corporations and broker-dealers, and several former insider traders and accused securities violators. When he isn't in the courtroom or preparing for litigation, he's teaching Securities Litigation, SEC Enforcement, and White Collar Crime at Georgetown University Law Center and the Washington College of Law of American University, or contributing another article to one of the nation's leading law journals.

Mathews's legal success is something of a surprise for a man who never thought he'd be able to afford to go to college or graduate school. He says he grew up "on the wrong side of the tracks" in Herkimer, N.Y., and worked as a dynamite "powder monkey" constructing highways for a year before he followed up on the Union full-tuition scholarship he was awarded upon his high school graduation.

An industrial engineering/administration major, Mathews learned during his senior year that he might be eligible for a scholarship to Albany Law School. He decided to take the law boards, was accepted, and was granted a full-tuition scholarship to Albany Law, which he now serves as a trustee.

After becoming an editor of the law review and winning the New York state moot court competition, Mathews landed a job with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington, D.C. By 1969, he had become the deputy associate director of the SEC's Enforcement Division (in charge of all criminal prosecutions), but it was time to move on. For Mathews, that meant moving to the other side of the courtroom.

Mathews says he completed his transition from prosecutor to defense attorney during his first case against the SEC shortly after his arrival at the law firm where he still practices. "These were friends and former colleagues of mine whom I had trained," Mathews recalls, "and they were refusing to disclose evidence to me. From that moment on I've been a defense attorney."

His more recent successes include an innovative settlement in 1994 with the SEC in its case against Prudential Securities. For the first time, the hundreds of thousands of Prudential clients/investors who together have more that $1 billion in claims can have their cases decided in less then a day after a hearing with an independent arbitrator. This past September, in a rare occurrence, a judge dismissed on summary judgement an SEC insider trading case against one of his clients, Howard Hoover, the former general counsel of Browning Ferris Industries.

Mathews says he never would have been as successful as he is if he hadn't continued teaching law for the last twenty-six years. "It forces me to read all the most recent cases and keeps me at the top of my profession," he says. "It lets me hone my skills and makes me a better practitioner." He won an award this year as Georgetown Law's outstanding adjunct professor.

He is quick to point out that he is not a "workaholic." He estimates that he works sixty hours a week, takes weekends off, and spends at least one month each year on vacation. Every seven years, he takes a six-month sabbatical and heads to Europe with his family.

A self-described family man, Mathews and his wife, Nancy Crisman, who is also a lawyer, adopted a three-year-old girl from Thailand last year. "She's been a wonderful addition to our family," says Mathews, who now has five children whose ages range from four to thirty-one.

Mathews plans to spend even more time with his family after successfully battling gastric cancer last spring. "It's opened up my perspective and made me want to take more vacations," he says. Nevertheless, the disease, operation, and chemotherapy hardly slowed Mathews down. He missed only three weeks of work-something his clients were certainly thankful for.

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