David Baugh: The Man Who Would Be Robin Hood; Woe to the King’s Men

by Charles McGuigan 06.1998

The law offices of David Baugh are located on the ground floor at 223 S. Cherry Street. His is a working desk, and as the phone rings, he takes the call. “I occasionally sue the police for fun and profit,” David says with an explosive burst of laughter. “I know you’ll take this in the Christian way it is intended.” Pause. “Bite me.” He lowers the receiver to the cradle. The son of a Tuskegee airman, Baugh is a big man— broad shoulders, barrel chest. He wears maroon suspenders over a white shirt crisp as unleavened wafer. “When I was a boy,” he remembers. “I used to get a dollar a week, well, maybe fifty cents a week allowance. And I saved my money till I had enough to buy a book. The book was Robin Hood and I’d wanted to read it for a long time. When my father saw the book, he asked, ‘Where’d you get that?’ I told him I’d bought it and he said, ‘That’s the last book you’ll ever buy. I will buy all the books you want.’” Baugh lifts his glasses and rubs the hollows of his eyes, wiping away a few tears. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Remembering those things about my father brings it out.” Because of his father’s military service, David lived far and wide as a child—Ohio, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines. In 1961 the Baughs moved to Nashville. It was a rude awakening for the young David Baugh. “Everything there was segregated,” he recalls. “The movies, restaurants. Everything. I went to an all black school there and that was a shock.” On the bases where he’d grown up, men and women were not judged by their race and virtually all social activity centered around the Officers Club. “The color of the metal on your shoulder had more to do with acceptance than the color of your skin,” he says. David Baugh is philosophical about incidents like these that he witnessed as a child. “I thought of them as low rent people,” he says. “They were ignorant.” David also understands the danger of combating racism with racism. In his own words, “One does not escape oppression by being an oppressor.” Instead he turns his eyes to the document that, in essence, outlaws racism—the Constitution. After high school he did undergraduate work down in Petersburg, got married, then studied law at Texas Southern University. “We got married in July and in August we put everything we had into two cars and drove to Texas,” he says. “I went to law school, and my wife worked at Sears. She put me through law school. My parents were also a great help. My father once sent me a $500 check with a note that said: ‘Happy Tuesday’. My mother sent us fifty or maybe a hundred books of Green Stamps and we went on a shopping spree. That’s how we bought our first vacuum cleaner.” Right after he passed the bar, David and two classmates opened the firm of Bennett, Baugh & Bastine which plied its trade for about three years. Early in his career David saw first hand how some judges can skew the law. “The case was Texas versus David Arps and a judge asked me to cheat,” he says. Arps, David’s client, was mentally incompetent. “The first time I met him he told me his foot had been cut off and when I looked down I saw two of the dirtiest feet I had ever seen” Baugh remembers. “I looked over a three-inch thick psychiatric record from the Marine Corps. He was obviously insane.” Accordingly, David motioned for an insanity plea, but the judge wanted the man convicted. David would not relent. He called the court reporter into the hallway and dictated his conversation with the judge verbatim. As he spoke, the judge yelled from his chambers, “Shut up, Mr. Baugh. Not one more word.” David continued his dictation as the court reporter typed away. “If you’re going to get raped, the least you can to ment, not the other way around. There had never been anything like it. And when the Founding Fathers signed on to the Constitution, they said, in effect, that this will be our moral rudder. The Constitution, philosophically is definite, but it leaves a lot unsaid. That’s the brilliance of it. And I think I understand it as it was envisioned.” The phone rings again and David answers it. “Listen, dear,” he says, sternly as a father, “This affidavit is much more serious than you thought. Under no circumstance talk to the police. That’s correct. I’ll talk to you soon.” 1998 1998 David Baugh: The Man Who Would Be Robin Hood; Woe To The King’s Men BY CHARLES G. MCGUIGAN do is scream,” he says. And it worked. Although the judge threatened to find David in contempt, he never followed through. “Corruption,” says David, “hates light.” This incident reminded David of the words of a college professor: “His name was Isaac Henderson and he said, ‘If you’re afraid of going to jail, don’t practice criminal law.’” During his career as an attorney Baugh has been in jail three times. “It’s part of the job,” he says. David later went to work as an assistant prosecutor for the United States Attorneys Office in Texas and later Virginia. In 1983 he went into private practice. In that time David has seen many judges who do not, in his opinion, do their jobs on the bench. “The judge is the advocate for the Constitution,” he says. “When I hear a judge say, ‘my job is to make sure the guilty are punished and the innocent go free,’ I say, ‘you’re wrong’. The judge is the umpire. He makes sure the rules are followed. If the judge fails to uphold the Constitution, he is not doing his job. And if you diminish the protection of the Constitution, you are going to hell.” It irritates David to palpable distraction that not one member of the U.S. Supreme Court is a criminal defense attorney. “Criminal defense attorneys understand the Constitution better than any other attorneys,” he says. “You learn the law from practicing the law. If you were about to be operated on you wouldn’t want a surgeon who said, ‘Well, I’ve read all the books, but I’ve never actually operated.’ You’d want someone who had worked in the E.R. Look at someone like Clarence Thomas. That man barely has a briefcase.” “The Constitution,” he says, in a voice that is theatrical in its projection, “is absolute. It is the most sacred document ever written by man, and it really upsets me that Americans squander the Constitution and the freedoms it gives us. So novel, so brilliant a document. It’s wasted on us. It was the first framing document where people gave power to govern “We were talking about the Constitution,” he says, after returning the receiver to its cradle. “It’s not hard to be arrogant about the Constitution. It is like having a fifty karat stone, a shiny new car. And, it’s mine. So many people take it for granted; it’s a case of pearls before swine. To understand the Constitution you need to share beliefs and have faith in it. And anyone who believes in the Constitution is anti-govern ment. I am a firm believer and I am anti-government. Every law that is made limits your freedom and makes the government stronger.” He mentions how he recently tried to get a police officer to ticket him for refusing to produce his driver’s license at a checkpoint. “These roadblocks are unconstitutional and I want to test them in court,” he says. “It’s in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Illegal search. If you went back two hundred and thirty years ago to Boston and colonists were being stopped on the streets and being asked for their papers, they’d say, ‘Hey, let’s start a revolution.’ And they’d be right. Revolution, remember, is the ultimate checks and balance.” David worries that we give up our rights to the government without considering consequences. “One of the scariest things today is the Victims Rights Amendment,” he says. “It’s an anti-defendant amendment, automatically pro-govern ment. It’s another case of the diminution of existing rights. And when those rights are gone, you never get them back.” He fairly rhapsodizes about the Constitution. “Our unadulterated law is a philosophy based on the Constitution,” he says. “Think of the beauty of this: the only way to protect religion is to let it alone. The people, not the government nor its functionaries, are the experts. No kings, no queens, no princes.” The government needs always to be watched. “All politicians and all police are British,” he says. “We Americans should view all government as the enemy. The purpose of the Constitution is to rein them in. The next time you look at Governor Gilmore picture him in a Red Coat.” He remembers the first time he was jailed for contempt of court. “That was the bottle in pants case,” he says with a groan and a roll of eyes. “There was this Mexican kid with a waist smaller than my wrist. He was charged with shoplifting two fifths of wine from a convenience store. I just tried to illustrate that there was no way he could have tucked the bottle into his pants. I had two bottles of wine in the courtroom and the judge told me not to proceed.” David persisted and was taken to city lock up. He mentions personal heroes—Jesus Christ, Saint Thomas More, Mahatma Gandhi. “And Pee Wee Reese,” says David, “He agreed to room with Jackie Robinson. He was one of these people willing to stand up all by himself because of principle.” Heroes It’s probably fair to assume that in among that pantheon of heroes is also an Englishman, one man who made the difference according to legend. “I’m Robin Hood,” says a beaming David Baugh. “And government is the King’s men.”