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Larma speaks about long career at defender's office
| Sunday, Oct 1 2006 10:05 PM
Last Updated: Sunday, Oct 1 2006 10:09 PM
His work has kept innocent men from being convicted of murder, but it wasn't the high-profile successes that James Larma wanted to talk about when he retired after a 32-year career as an investigator with the public defender's office last month.
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He's investigated between 150 and 200 homicides, and about a dozen death penalty cases, but one case that really stands out to him was a woman who was accused of beating up her prostitute sister in Mettler in the 1970s. One man he was interviewing, who turned out to be the person who actually beat the woman, turned a hose on Larma.
"Every case is important, and I've had just as much fun proving someone innocent on a misdemeanor," Larma said.
When it comes to high-profile cases, it's the ones he hasn't won that stand out to Larma. He worked on some of the satanic sacrifice cases on the mid-1980s that made national news. The cases involved dozens of suspects and more than 20 children, but ultimately fell apart for lack of evidence.
"You go out to the house and it's so obvious there's never been a fire in the den," Larma said. "It feels awful. It gives you ulcers."
Public defender investigators are the only way to counter the police and prosecutor version of events, Larma said. He worked long hours because he and his colleagues are defending people's constitutional rights, and there's nothing more important than that, he said.
Larma would hate to think that an innocent person went to jail just because he wanted to clock out at 5 p.m. on the dot. Once he worked overtime on Christmas Eve so a Lerdo inmate, in jail because of a case of mistaken identity, could spend the holiday with his family.
"That's our worst fear, that we didn't work that extra hour," Larma said.
Larma beat his brains out to investigate every angle of every case, according to retired public defender John Ulman, who worked with Larma for several years.
"He did that for 30 years. He never changed. He would work long hours, sometimes not getting home until 8 or 9 o'clock at night," Ulman said.
"He understands and respects the Constitution, but he also appreciates how politics can distort constitutional meaning," Public Defender Mark Arnold said of Larma.
"In many situations, there's a political pressure to advance the interest of law enforcement over the constitutional right of citizens," Arnold said. "It's critical that we maintain the balance between the two."
Larma became the chief investigator for the office in 1977, about three years after he started there. He's loved his job because he loves people, he said.
"It's a fun job. It's not pleasant. It's hard talking to people who have been beat up, or victims of rape," Larma said. "For the longest time, I couldn't wait for Monday. I couldn't wait to come back."
Still, the three decades of fighting the good fight, sometimes against a system that seems intent on getting a conviction at the price of truth, has taken it's toll on the investigator. Larma is ready to spend some time fly-fishing, remodeling his home and surfing.
But he's worked on enough cases where a suspect's side of the story turned out to be true for him to feel it's absolutely necessary for the public defender's office to have its own investigators.
"Do this job for two months and when someone asks you how can you represent these guilty people, how can you not?" Larma said. "How hard would you want someone to fight for you?"