Rick Lougee and Ken Peasley could pass for fraternal twins. Both men are fifty-seven, of medium height and weight, with gray hair and a gray beard. Peasley has a slicked-back pompadour, Lougee the tousled look of an aging hippie. Though made from similar raw material, the two men come out of different worlds. Like Peasley, Lougee took a circuitous route to Tucson. He was born into a middle-class family in Connecticut, educated at Franklin and Marshall College, and started law school at Duke in 1969. At that point, he was drafted into the Army, where he served as a stateside chaplain's assistant; after he was discharged, in 1971, he went to Tucson to study Romantic poetry at the University of Arizona. But he didn't have the patience for academic life, so he returned to law school, graduated in 1977, and began a career as a defense attorney. He lived in Connecticut, New Mexico, and Key West until he remembered how much he had liked Tucson as a graduate student and returned there, with his second wife, in 1988. He spent six years with the public defender's office and opened a private practice with a friend the following year. "Because we were just starting out and didn't have any clients of our own, we applied to the county for what were called 'contract' murder cases," Lougee told me."The first one I got was Chris McCrimmon."
Lougee and I were talking in the small adobe house, across the street from the university, where he lives with his wife, who works for him as a paralegal, and their twelve-year-old son. By the late nineties, Lougee had been a defense lawyer for more than two decades, and he had few illusions about the system, or about his own clients. "I normally don't ask my clients whether they're guilty," he told me. "Personally, I don't care. But the first thing Chris said to me was 'Dawg, I didn't do it.' Frankly, it didn't make much of an impression. I've tried hundreds of cases. I've heard it all from clients before."
Late one night, shortly before McCrimmon's retrial in 1997, Lougee started reading the transcript ofWoods's first tape-recorded interview with the police, the one on September 8, 1992. Lougee noticed that, during the course of that long, rambling conversation, Woods made a brief reference to an earlier discussion with Godoy. "I said to myself,'Holy shit, Joe had talked to him before,' " Lougee said. "I see how Peasley has been finessing this issue. He's been arguing to the juries that Woods must be telling the truth because there is no other way that Woods could have known this information. Now I see that's not true. It becomes clear to me that Woods didn't come up with those names-Godoy did."
At the last minute, in 1997, the judge severed McCrimmon and Minnitt's joint trial into separate cases. Minnitt went first, and Lougee walked into the courtroom to listen to some of the testimony, because the same witnesses would also be testifying in the McCrimmon retrial. Peasley asked Godoy about his initial interview with Woods: "When you first sat down and talked with Mr. Woods on September 8 of 1992…had you come upwith the name Chris McCrimmon?" "No, sir," Godoy said.
"Had you come up with the name Andre Minnitt?" "No, sir."
Godoy further testified that he had never heard of Martin Soto-Fong before the September 8th interview.
Peasley drove the point home: "The first time you heard any of those three names would have been in the conversation with Keith
Woods on September 8, 1992?"
"Yes," Godoy replied.
"I knew that Godoy had committed perjury in that trial," Lougee said.
Minnitt's second trial ended in a hung jury, and he remained incarcerated on his conviction in the Mariano's Pizza case. McCrimmon's retrial-Lougee's case-began within a few days of Minnitt's. When Lougee prepared, in August of 1997, he made a chart laying out evidence that Godoy had lied in the previous trial. During the retrial, faced with proof that he had elicited false testimony from Godoy, Peasley responded by attacking Lougee for raising the issue.
"Peasley was leaning on the counsel table, hissing at me. His saliva was on me," Lougee recalled. "His finger was six inches away from my face." Repeatedly, in a series of heated conferences with the judge, Peasley expressed shock that Lougee could question his integrity, and dared the defense lawyer to lodge a formal complaint against him.
"He is accusing me of suborning perjury, and if he is going to make those accusations," Peasley said to the judge outside the hearing of the jury,"he should have filed a-"
"Hold it," the judge interjected.
Peasley later challenged Lougee directly in the courtroom: "If Mr. Lougee thought this was perjury, he should have filed a complaint. He hasn't done that."
Nevertheless, Lougee proceeded to demonstrate to the jury that, in fact, Keith Woods had not spontaneously volunteered the names of the suspects in the El Grande case. After just forty-two minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted McCrimmon of the murders. "When the jury came back, Chris picks me up in his arms and says, 'See, dawg, I told you! I told you!' " Lougee recalled. Later that day, Lougee began drafting his complaint about Peasley to the Arizona state bar. "I didn't celebrate," he told me."I went and filed a bar complaint"-on September 5, 1997. Lougee added, "It has cost me dearly."
But Peasley remained a power in the county attorney's office. In April of 1998, Barbara LaWall, who succeeded Steve Neely as county attorney, appointed Peasley as head of the criminal division, making him the top prosecutor in her office. (In April of 1999, Minnitt went on trial for a third time for the El Grande Market murders, without Peasley as the prosecutor, and was again convicted and sentenced to death.) Even with his new administrative duties, Peasley continued trying and winning cases, and in 1999 he received a national honor-the Association of Government Attorneys in Capital Litigation's Trial Advocacy Award. Lougee, on the other hand, found that his professional life was getting harder. "From the day I brought the complaint, I basically stopped getting plea offers for my clients from that office," Lougee said. (Pima County officials deny that they retaliated against Lougee's clients."I think Rick Lougee suffers from considerable paranoia from time to time," LaWall told me.) Judges, prosecutors, and even defense lawyers rallied to testify for Peasley. Lougee had few supporters; among them was Richard Parrish, a Tucson lawyer and friend, who says, "This guy discovered extreme wrongdoing in a capital case by the most respected prosecutor in Tucson and brought it before judges and before the bar, and was excoriated at every instance for doing such a thing to such a great man."
Still, the bar complaint did move forward, and Peasley had to get a lawyer: he chose his old friend James Stuehringer, who had unsuccessfully represented Martin Soto-Fong in the first El Grande trial, in 1993, and who had his own reasons to be grateful to Peasley. In early 1998, Stuehringer's son Craig was arrested in Cincinnati for possessing a hidden gun while dealing drugs, a crime that carried a mandatory three-year prison term, and Peasley intervened on the young man's behalf. Peasley urged the Ohio judge to allow Craig to do community service rather than serve a prison sentence. (In the end, the judge reduced the charges so that Craig Stuehringer could receive a sentence of probation.)
James Stuehringer, a gregarious midwesterner with a head full of carefully barbered salt-and-pepper hair, practices civil and criminal law at one of the larger firms in Tucson. The obvious question is whether Stuehringer had a conflict of interest. How could he defend the prosecutor against charges of misconduct in the very case that had put one of his clients on death row?
"I was done representing Fong," Stuehringer told me over lunch at Rigo's. "I had taken his case all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined to take his case. I had written him a letter saying, 'I worked my ass off for you, and I wish you well,' " Stuehringer said. "The accusations against Ken just had to do with McCrimmon and Minnitt. So was there a conflict in representing Peasley? I sat down with my partners to talk about it, and they said, 'There's no conflict, but be prepared for some shit.' "