San Diego powerhouse attorney Milt Silverman, whose courtroom successes included some of the biggest cases in the region, died May 21 after a short battle with an illness. He was 79.
In his 50-year legal career, Silverman didn’t just take cases. He took on causes. He thrived with his name attached to some of San Diego’s most famous — or infamous — legal battles, cases that shocked the community conscience or flipped convention on its head.
“He’s in the top three attorneys in the history of San Diego. Extraordinarily talented trial lawyer,” said former District Attorney Paul Pfingst, who has been practicing law in the region for 40 years.
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Silverman had the “unique ability to see through to the essence of the case, and to see the client’s story,” longtime friend and attorney Bob Boyce said. “He could see the prince among all the frogs.”
Inside the courtroom, Silverman was fierce and eloquent and preternaturally prepared, with solid experts and intense research and investigation. Sometimes gruff and always quick-witted, he was a showman willing to get on the floor to show a jury his argument in a summation. Friends laugh about the time he had a life-sized co*ckpit built in an El Cajon courtroom during a civil trial in which he represented an airline pilot.
Silverman handled both criminal defense and civil cases so he could represent people he believed had been wronged.
“Whenever he discussed a case, it was in the context of how he would help a victim of injustice ... change their lives and positively impact others,” longtime colleague and friend Bob Ottilie said.
Silverman successfully defended his first murder case when he was 25 years old: a Marine accused of gunning down a police officer in Vietnam. In the early 1980s, he secured a murder acquittal for a gay man who killed a woman in self-defense, fighting her off as she was raping him — which Silverman argued to the jury was physically possible. Decades later, he won findings of factual innocence for teenagers wrongly accused in the death of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe. One of the teens was her brother. Silverman also secured settlements for her family.
Milt Silverman speaks on the steps of his law office on Broadway during a press conference with members of the Crowe family in 2002.
(Charlie Neuman/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
But the case that made him legendary in legal circles — and which arguably changed policing in San Diego — arose from a 1985 traffic stop in Encanto that ended with the young Black driver fatally shooting a White San Diego police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian ride-along before fleeing in a police car.
“It really doesn’t jump out at you that the case is defensible,” said Boyce. “It took Milt to see through what actually happened.”
Silverman represented the 18-year-old driver, Sagon Penn, arguing self-defense against excessive force by police beating him with batons. Following two trials, Penn was acquitted on murder, attempted murder and manslaughter charges in what Silverman himself later called “the biggest, most divisive, racially charged, criminal case in the history of San Diego.”
The case and the verdicts roiled the region, straining already frayed racial tensions and leading to the creation of a citizen police review board.
Pfingst, who sat on that review board, said the Penn case marked “the lowest point in police-community relations in the history of San Diego,” and the “ripples went on for years and years.”
“He was treated with extreme disdain by the police department for representing Sagon Penn,” Pfingst said. “He didn’t care. He was a defense lawyer. He felt that was the nobility of the calling.”
Sagon Penn, 23, shot and killed San Diego police Officer Thomas Riggs, 27, and wounded another officer and a civilian police observer following a traffic stop and scuffle in Encanto. Within a hour of the shootings, Penn walked into the central police headquarters downtown and told police he had shot two officers. Here he is shown being escorted to a car by detectives on April 1, 1985.
(Michael Franklin/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Silverman became the target of death threats. He bought a gun, even carried it while grocery shopping with his family, his wife said.
“He loved to defend people that were hurting,” wife Maria Silverman said. “He gave his heart and soul and mind to those cases.”
He wrote a book, “Open and Shut,” about a mid-1970s case he took. He defended an Imperial County woman who’d sought someone to kill her husband and supplied a contract killer with photos of her husband and his usual route to work. But the contract killer was actually an undercover law enforcement officer. After her arrest, she confessed.
Silverman argued that a man who had designs on both his client and her husband’s business had hypnotized his client to convince her to have her husband killed. She was acquitted at trial.
Born in Colorado in 1944, Silverman later moved to the region and graduated from Grossmont High School in 1962 and from San Diego State University in 1966. A few years later, he graduated from UCLA’s law school. He spent two years in a fellowship working for legal aid societies and had a dog he named Justice. He also studied up on military law and started taking cases at 32nd Street Naval Station.
He eschewed working for someone else and gave a peek at that thinking in a 2006 interview with the San Diego County Bar Association: “I hung a shingle out and starved. Couldn’t afford an apartment, so I slept on the floor of my office, showered at San Diego State University where I taught a class.”
A 1985 San Diego Union profile of Silverman during the Penn case proclaimed that “cigars and piercing blue eyes” marked his presence and noted his nickname was “Silver Tongue.”
Silverman insisted on doing thorough investigations. “It was his No. 1 thing,” Ottilie said. Silverman routinely went to crime scenes, looking for clues police had missed.
And it wasn’t about the money. “Milt took on these cases largely on his own dime if he saw the cause,” Ottilie said.
On the civil side, Silverman represented a Navy man wrongly accused of molesting his 8-year-old daughter — it turned out a stranger had crawled in through her window, as she said had happened. He also represented Dale Akiki, wrongly accused in a bizarre case involving allegations of ritual child abuse at a church nursery school. Both cases live in San Diego infamy.
His ability to excel in both civil and criminal cases was “extraordinary,” said retired state and federal judge Victor Bianchini, who befriended Silverman around 1970.
“He is singularly a legendary trial lawyer,” Bianchini said. “Harkens back to the days of Clarence Darrow, he was that great.”
Among his many accolades, Silverman was once tapped San Diego Trial Lawyer of the Year. He also was the recipient of an NAACP Freedom Award for his work on a case in the 1970s involving Navy sailors on a San Diego-based ship.
For decades, many weeks started with a Monday Night Football gathering of friends at his San Diego home. The end of the week was capped with Friday night Bible study there.
Silverman was devoted to his wife. She remembers when she was a hostess in a downtown restaurant and a “dashing young man” came in for lunch. He later returned to ask her out. They were together for 50 years.
Silverman is survived by his wife, Maria, two children and four grandchildren. Services are pending.
