Rescuer in Red Velvet

William Geraway was about as buried as a live man can be. Convicted of murder in 1968, he was serving a life term hi the maximum-security prison at Walpole, Mass., without possibility of parole. The Supreme Judicial Court of the state had rejected his plea for a review. He was also in solitary confinement--voluntarily and indefinitely --because his testimony against alleged killers in two other trials had led to reports that mobsters were offering $50,000 to have him murdered. Geraway, 37, would probably still be in that deadend fix were it not for Steven Duke, a quixotic law professor from Yale with a penchant for seemingly hopeless cases.

Geraway renewed his fight for vindication in 1969, when he heard that Crane, Inker & Oteri, the Boston law firm that represented him at his original trial, had also been counsel to five of the prosecution witnesses on different matters. That possible conflict of interest seemed to be a ground for reversal. Though he eventually approached 14 different attorneys, most were reluctant to take the case. Two lawyers who were willing had to be paid a fee--an impossibility for Geraway, formerly a part-time laborer and full-time criminal with 32 felony convictions, most for passing bad checks. Then the convict read a story about Professor Duke (TIME, March 28,1969).

Tired Eyes. Duke had just finished three years of unpaid work on the case of James Miller, a Connecticut hairdresser convicted of participation in a narcotics smuggling ring. Convinced that Miller had been wrongly identified by the key witness, Duke finally won a reversal when he showed that the witness had been secretly questioned under hypnosis during which supporting details of his identification could have been suggested.

Geraway, who also claims to be a victim of mistaken identity, wrote to Duke, but his letter was read by tired eyes. "When I finished the Miller case," Duke recalls, "I said I would never get involved in anything like it again. I worked an average of 30 hours a week on that one." He and Geraway did begin a correspondence, however, and a year later, when Geraway wrote that he had "held on to rationality as long as I could," Duke visited him at Walpole. Once he read the trial transcript, Duke was hooked. "I wish the hell you hadn't convinced me you were innocent," Duke told the prisoner. "Then I could go back to Connecticut with a clear conscience."

Instead he went back with a heavy work load. He concluded that the emphasis for any new appeal should be on the legal conflict of interest. He and a law-student assistant interviewed reluctant witnesses and went through court records and notifications of attorney appearances in order to determine exactly whom Geraway's lawyers were representing at the time of the trial. They gathered evidence to support the claim that five of the witnesses against Geraway were in fact being represented in criminal or civil cases of their own by Geraway's law firm.

In October, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court reversed the conviction in a lengthy opinion critical of Geraway's representation. The state now plans a retrial. Meanwhile, it has successfully argued that Geraway should be kept hi prison for his own safety.

Duke's zeal is unusual in that he has spent $3,000 of his own on the Geraway case; moreover, he has little practical experience in criminal matters. A onetime clerk to Justice William O. Douglas, Duke was a tax specialist when he joined the Yale faculty in 1960. There his interests changed. "Who cares whether a corporation pays X dollars or Y dollars?" asks Duke now. "Economists do not even agree on who bears the burden of a corporate tax, so how can you get excited when you can't even tell what people are ultimately paying?"

"My colleagues do not consider me a good role model," says Duke, 39, who favors red velvet suits and wears his blond hair over the collar. "They say I do not know how to lose." Now Duke is planning how to win an acquittal at Geraway's new trial. He hopes the trial comes during the summer, lest it interrupt his classes. Every so often, says the tenured professor, "my dean and I have a little talk, and since I have never done the outside writing that is expected, he wants to know what I am doing with my time."

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