Charles Garry

Charles R. Garry (March 17, 1909 – August 16, 1991) was an American civil rights attorney who represented a number of high-profile clients in political cases during the 1960s and 1970s, including Huey P. Newton during his 1968 capital murder trial and the Peoples Temple during the 1978 Jonestown tragedy.

Early life Born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to Armenian immigrant parents who had escaped the Hamidian massacres in the Ottoman Empire, Garry grew up in a farm town in California's Central Valley. The family name was originally Garabedian. He worked his way through law school at night at a cleaning shop and was a Great Depression-era socialist who began his legal career defending militant trade unions. Like many in his generation, Garry earned his law degree without attending college, and suffered difficulty with spelling and syntax. In the 1950s, Garry represented other alleged Communists before the HUAC and refused to answer questions himself stating, "I told them to kiss my ass." Subsequently, he defended Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale. Garry was famous for flair and courtroom dramatics, and one policeman, under intense questioning, jumped from the witness stand and pulled his gun on Garry.

Peoples Temple

In 1977, amidst media scrutiny and potential litigation, Garry began representing the controversial Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, Garry's political philosophy meshed at least to some degree with that of the Temple, a socialist organization, and many felt that Garry's representation added credibility to the Temple as a political organization. Garry believed that the Temple picked up where the movement of the 1960s left off, and that Jonestown was like "socialized society". Garry had a tumultuous relationship with another Temple attorney, Mark Lane, because Garry felt that Lane repeatedly interfered in Garry's areas of representation and made too high profile the Temple's claims of a conspiracy against it.

Garry and Lane accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan and his delegation on their investigation of Jonestown in November 1978. On November 18, 1978, Garry and Lane escaped potential harm at Jonestown by talking their way past Temple security at a house to which they were sent that was located some distance from Jonestown's pavilion. That day, 918 people died in Jonestown and Georgetown, which comprised the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until the incidents of September 11, 2001. In addition, five people were murdered by Temple members at a nearby airstrip, including Congressman Ryan, who became the only congressman murdered in the line of duty in United States history.

Later life While Garry continued to practice law after the Jonestown incident, his clientele changed and his chance for further national acclaim had passed. Garry died of a stroke in August 1991, at the age of 82 in Berkeley, California.