2 Lawyers Fight Over Inmate as He Faces Execution

With just five days standing between condemned killer Bill Bradford and the execution he once wanted but now fears, his case has descended into unseemly legal chaos.

Two attorneys are fighting over the death row inmate. Each insists that he is Bradford’s sole legal representative. Both have filed separate documents before separate federal judges in Los Angeles. Both--in case files bearing different numbers--request stays of execution.

No stay has been issued, and without one, prison officials say they are prepared to move Bradford today to the cell closest to the execution chamber. He will be put under a 24-hour suicide watch. He is scheduled to die by lethal injection just after the stroke of midnight Tuesday.

In a telephone interview, Bradford said prison officials asked him Monday what he wanted for his last meal. He told them nothing.

“I’m not going to feel like eating if they kill me,” he said.

In recent days, Bradford has come to view his execution not as a release from a grim life behind bars, but as an injustice thrust upon him by a wayward legal system.

“This is what he has brought upon himself by being cute,” said Jack Leavitt, the attorney who says he has represented Bradford, without pay for slightly more than a year.

“This thing’s a nightmare,” said Robert R. Bryan, the San Francisco attorney who says Bradford finally persuaded him to take the case last week. “This case would not be in this state if not for Leavitt.”

At the center of the controversy is Bradford, who at various times has taken firm positions on both sides of the issue. On Aug. 3, he told a Times reporter that he wanted to die, and that Leavitt was his attorney. On Tuesday, he stated in a telephone interview that he wanted to live, and that Bryan was his attorney.

Bradford, in court papers filed Wednesday, accused Leavitt of misrepresenting his wish to die in a letter Leavitt wrote to the court over the weekend. Leavitt wrote that Bradford again wished to die and asked that the court disregard a request for a stay that Leavitt had sent via fax late last week.

“Mr. Leavitt does not represent me,” Bradford stated in a signed declaration. “He is mistaken, for I do not want to be executed. Rather, I would like to pursue my constitutional rights in this court.”

In a handwritten note in the margin, Bradford called Leavitt’s letter “false, a lie, and a misrepresentation to the court.”

In late June, Bradford announced that he had abandoned his appeals and wished to be executed. Superior Court Judge Paul Boland, who presided over Bradford’s 1987 murder trial, signed the death warrants June 25.

In early 1988, Bradford was sentenced to die for the strangulation murders of Shari Miller and Tracey Campbell, two young Venice-area women he had befriended and promised to photograph. Prosecutors said he was a sadistic thrill killer who took body parts as souvenirs and was suspected of killing at least a half dozen others.

Court records also indicate that he has tried to take his own life at least three times.

Bradford fired his lawyers during the death penalty phase of the trial, and delivered a short, chilling closing argument that guaranteed a death sentence. In an interview with The Times last week, he said that at the time of the trial he feared life in prison without parole more than he feared death.

Bryan said Bradford is upset and afraid over the state of his case and uncertainty over whether the execution will be carried out--apparently now against his wishes. He said Bradford felt manipulated and betrayed by Leavitt, who Bryan said “played with his mind.”

Leavitt, meanwhile, is demanding that the court not appoint Bryan to represent Bradford. The attorney alleges that Bryan violated professional ethics by snatching a client out from under him.

Each attorney is asking the court to appoint him as Bradford’s lawyer. The inmate currently has no court-appointed lawyer.

Bryan, whose practice consists entirely of death penalty litigation, called Leavitt’s demand for an investigation “some idiot lawyer’s sour grapes because he can’t get his client executed.”

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Times staff writer David Rosenzweig contributed to this story.