If Joe Jamail was the King of Torts, Racehorse Haynes was the man you wanted standing next to you when the State came for your liberty. He was Houston’s greatest criminal defense lawyer, a Marine who came home from Iwo Jima and spent the rest of his life on the side of the accused, and he tried every case as if one citizen’s freedom were the only thing in the world that mattered. In that room, it was.
The name was an accident that fit. A high school football coach watched him run for the sideline instead of straight into the line and called him Racehorse, and it stuck for seventy years because it was true of the way he practiced law. He was born in 1927, went to war young, and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for pulling two drowning Marines out of the water. He came back, took an accounting degree at the University of Houston, and then a law degree from the same school in 1956. Everything after that he did in Texas courtrooms.
What he believed, and what made him great, was the thing the rest of us are supposed to believe and sometimes forget under pressure: that the accused is entitled to a defense, a real one, put on by a lawyer who is not embarrassed to fight. The State has the police, the crime lab, the prosecutors, and the presumption in the public’s mind that where there is smoke there is fire. The defense has one lawyer and the presumption of innocence, which lives only as long as somebody in that room is willing to insist on it. Haynes insisted, every time, harder than anyone.
He is famous for a record that sounds impossible, a reported stretch of a hundred and sixty three drunk driving cases won in a row, and for two acquittals of the Fort Worth millionaire T. Cullen Davis in cases the whole state assumed were unwinnable. He represented Vickie Daniel and helped establish the battered woman’s defense in Texas, and his defense of the surgeon John Hill became the spine of a famous book. The cases were sensational. The lesson underneath them is not. He won them the same way, with total preparation, a theory of the case a jury could hold in one hand, and a cross-examination that took the State’s story apart one honest question at a time.
The quote everyone remembers is about a dog, and it is really a lesson in how to think about a defense. Asked how he would defend a dog-bite case, he said: “Say you sue me because you claim my dog bit you. Well now, this is my defense: My dog doesn’t bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don’t believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don’t have a dog.” People laugh, and then they miss the point. He was teaching alternative pleading, the discipline of finding every independent reason the other side loses and refusing to bet the case on only one of them. That is not a joke. That is how you keep a client free when your best argument fails.
His courtroom style was theatrical, and lawyers who only saw the theater learned the wrong thing from him. The showmanship was never the substance; it was the delivery system for the substance. Behind every dramatic cross was a lawyer who had read every page of the file, who knew the State’s witnesses better than the State did, who had already found the soft place in the case and was simply choosing the moment to lean on it. The jury felt a performer. What was actually beating them was the preparation. There is no shortcut to that, and imitating the style without doing the work is how young lawyers embarrass themselves.
There is a reason to put a criminal defense lawyer in a series read mostly by a plaintiff’s lawyer, and it is this. The defense lawyer’s faith is the purest version of the thing every trial lawyer needs. He stands up for the least popular person in the building, against the full weight of the government, and he does it on the principle that the weight has to be tested before it is allowed to fall. A plaintiff’s lawyer who carries a little of that into a civil courtroom, the refusal to be intimidated by the size of the other side, is a better lawyer for it. Haynes carried a lot of it.
He died in 2017, past ninety, still the standard by which Houston measures a criminal defense lawyer. The record was real, the cases were real, and the belief underneath them was the realest thing about him: that no citizen should ever stand alone against the State, and that the lawyer who stands with him should never apologize for the job. That is worth remembering on the nights when a case looks lost and the client is counting on you to keep fighting anyway.
Richard “Racehorse” Haynes (1927 to 2017), the Houston criminal defense lawyer widely regarded as one of the finest trial advocates Texas ever produced. A Marine decorated with the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism as a young man, he graduated from the University of Houston Law Center in 1956 and built a legendary defense practice, including the acquittals of T. Cullen Davis and his defense of clients in several of the most closely watched trials in modern Texas history. Considered here for the craft, and for what a Houston trial lawyer inherits from him. This is general information, not legal advice.
