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I was born in Enid, Oklahoma, in October, 1968, while my father was engaged in his tour of duty in Vietnam as an Army grunt with the 25th Infantry Division (Tropical Lightning). He arrived in Vietnam in November 1967, not quite nineteen-years-old and just three months prior to the Tet Offensive. He completed his tour and returned to Enid, where both he and my mother were born and raised. He joined the Enid Police Department in 1970 and worked as a police officer until 1979.
During this time we moved to Garber, Oklahoma, where I graduated from High School. After High School I attended Oklahoma State University at Stillwater, Oklahoma, but without any clear career goals. After two years at OSU taking general classes, I discovered that I missed the comforting aroma of Old Spice aftershave and the creaking of the heavy-leather Sam Browne belts from my childhood growing up around cops. I decided to become a policeman, and transferred to Northwestern Oklahoma State University at Alva, Oklahoma, to enroll in the Law Enforcement program, which I completed in 1990.
During my studies in Alva, I took several classes from Professor Glen Jenlink, who has probably taught half the cops in Oklahoma, and became increasingly interested in the court opinions that we sometimes studied.
Gradually, I became more interested in the legal system and the administration of rules governing the behavior of cops than in actually becoming a cop myself. So after I graduated from NWOSU in 1990, I took the LSAT and was accepted into the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
My very first law school instructor was Anita Hill, who taught first year contracts. In my experience, she was a very smart and classy lady. She became embroiled in the Senate confirmation hearings of then-Judge Clarence Thomas, which garnered extensive national media attention and caused quite a bit of excitement and division on campus and in the law school.
An affinity for legal research eventually landed me on The Oklahoma Law Review, which rigorously tested my writing and editing skills. I devoted a lot of time and energy to a paper about Oklahoma's then-new law designed to address the problem of criminal "stalking", and the paper was selected for publication in the Law Review in 1993: Comment, Criminal Law: Criminal "Anti-Stalking" Laws: Oklahoma Hops on the Legislative Bandwagon, 46 Okla. L. Rev. 109 (1993).Greg Heiser and I spent endless hours nit-picking the galley drafts, literally reading them to each other word-for-word, looking for mistakes. That experience acclimated me to an attention to detail which has served me well in the real world.
After graduation in May, 1993, and with the bar exam looming in July, I found gainful employment back in Enid with Stephen Jones, a well-known and established attorney. While I was still studying for the bar exam and living in Norman, Stephen said he wanted me to draft an appeal to the Tenth Circuit in a "little habeas case" that he had.
The “little habeas case” consisted of about fifteen boxes of documents involving multiple layers of appellate proceedings. The client was Roger Dale Stafford and the State had the intent of executing him for the murders of nine persons, three in our case (the Lorenz family) and six for the “Sirloin Stockade” murders in Oklahoma City (Robert Ravitz represented Roger in that case). I consider Roger my first client and his case was my quite dramatic introduction to the practice of criminal law. I drafted that initial pleading, as well as hundreds of others after that, with the assistance and guidance of Robert L. Wyatt, IV, and of course, Stephen himself.
Stephen and I witnessed Roger's execution on July 1, 1995, (Stephen's birthday) and I can describe that experience only as surreal and profoundly disturbing. (Unfortunately, I witnessed a second execution of a client, Jay Wesley Neill, in December, 2002). At the time of Roger's execution, Stephen had already been appointed to represent Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing case, yet another disturbing and high profile case.
In 1997, after returning from the Oklahoma City Bombing trial in Denver, I went out on my own. During my time in Enid as a solo practitioner, I was accepted as a member of the Special Death Penalty Habeas Corpus Panel administered by the Federal Public Defender's Office (I currently represent four death row inmates in federal habeas); and I taught four semesters of undergraduate college courses as an adjunct professor for NWOSU's Enid campus. Still drawn to law enforcement, I also completed CLEET training and acquired an armed private investigator’s license.
In 2003 I left Enid for Oklahoma City after landing a job at the law offices of John W. Coyle, III, another courtroom master with many trial and appellate victories. Today, I am once again a solo practitioner in Oklahoma City with an office at Ogle Law Office as "of counsel" at 100 Park Avenue, Suite 500, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 73102. |
