In 2006, Charlie Weiss ’68J.D. took a phone call from a fellow member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, asking Weiss to represent a man who had served more than 12 years in prison for killing a woman he said he had never met. Weiss, one of Missouri’s top litigators, who as a partner at the prestigious St. Louis Law firm of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner has represented numerous Fortune 500 companies, already had experience doing pro bono criminal defense work, including two victories before the Supreme Court of the United States. But before he would agree to take this case, representing Josh Kezer, he said he must be convinced of Kezer’s innocence.
Kezer had been convicted by a Missouri jury of the 1992 murder of Mischelle Lawless and was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Lawless, only 19 at the time of her death, had been shot three times and abandoned in her car on an interstate ramp. Reviewing the case, Weiss saw there had been no physical evidence linking Kezer to the crime scene. Instead, Kezer had been convicted primarily on the testimony of informants who said they had heard Kezer bragging about killing Lawless — testimony tainted by their motivation as convicted criminals to have the state grant them leniency on their own sentences.
Weiss also talked to Kezer, who was only 17 years old at the time of Lawless’s death, and convinced himself the young man was innocent, based mostly on the evidence — or lack of it — but also on his own gut feeling. “It didn’t make any sense he was a person who was going to kill somebody,” Weiss says. “He was just a young boy and had not gotten into any trouble before like that.”
Weiss took the case. He worked on it for several years, alongside another partner from his firm and attorneys from the Kansas City, Missouri-based Midwest Innocence Project. Their investigation resulted in the jailhouse snitches recanting their testimonies and uncovered prosecutorial misconduct. Kezer’s legal team filed a habeas corpus petition, which challenges the grounds of someone’s conviction or confinement, in Cole County Circuit Court, where the judge decided that “no reasonable juror would convict Kezer on the basis of the evidence now presented” and vacated Kezer’s sentence — making him the first person in Missouri declared innocent in a habeas corpus case. Kezer was set free in February 2009, after he’d served nearly 16 years.
Wrongful convictions — even wrongful executions — are a sorry fact of our justice system. Since 1989, more than 3,300 people have been exonerated after wrongful convictions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The Innocence Project, a New York City-based national nonprofit organization, estimates that as many as 30,000 to 60,000 individuals, representing 2 to 5 percent of the current U.S. prison population, are locked up for crimes they didn’t commit.
Weiss attributes these wrongful convictions to human failings, primarily testimony from jailhouse informants often compromised by their motivation to improve their own circumstances and the misidentification of suspects by unreliable eyewitnesses. But he has not lost faith in the system. Much like the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who in 2006 said that “reversal of an erroneous conviction . . . determines not the failure of the system, but its success,” Weiss says his faith in the system is fortified by the process it provides to remedy mistakes.
“When we can achieve in our justice system the correction of a terrible wrong — someone convicted of a crime that they didn’t do — there’s a lot of reward . . . and personal satisfaction,” he says. “I can’t think of anything more important in the law.”
A Missouri native, Weiss, 83, has had a long and illustrious legal career. He has tried more than 100 civil cases and about two dozen criminal cases to judgment over more than a half-century of practicing law. His client list includes major corporations that he has represented in areas ranging from government contracts to construction of secondary wastewater treatment plants. In one of his biggest cases, he secured contractor rights for McDonnell Douglas as part of a $50 million settlement. Along the way, in addition to his two pro bono victories in the nation’s highest court, he has racked up numerous awards and honors. Among them, he was named Missouri’s 2020 Lawyer of the Year by Missouri Lawyers Weekly and recognized as a Distinguished Pro Bono Fellow by the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2021.
Despite these victories and accolades, he says, nothing quite compares to the feeling he had watching Kezer walk out of the Jefferson City Correctional Center, seeing the criminal justice system right one of its wrongs. He has since worked to free four more men wrongfully accused and convicted of murders they didn’t commit. The pro bono work he does on behalf of those wrongfully convicted is bread and butter for his soul.
Jonathan Potts, a fellow partner at Bryan Cave who’s assisted Weiss on innocence cases for the past 14 years, believes Weiss embodies the ideal of an attorney, the very antithesis of the stereotypical dishonest and self-serving trial lawyer badgering witnesses and shouting at his adversaries. “He represents the best that the legal profession has to offer, not just in his legal skills, which are unparalleled, but by what the legal profession is supposed to be, a noble profession,” Potts says. “Throughout 14 years, he has only shown kindness and patience toward me. He’s always positive. I have never heard him speak an ill word about another person.”
After all his success, Weiss might seem to have been predestined to practice law. But that’s not the case. In fact, he almost didn’t go to law school. As a young man, he’d thought about the good he could do as an attorney, but coming from a family of modest means, he felt the cost of going to law school was prohibitive. Instead, he aspired to be a journalist. He earned a journalism degree at the University of Missouri and worked over summer breaks for his hometown paper in Perryville. He was finishing a second degree in history at Missouri when the chaplain of the Newman Center, Father Donald Kemper, gave Weiss a tip that would change the course of his life.
Kemper had met Weiss in classes they’d taken together and knew he had an interest in the law. He let Weiss know that the Notre Dame Law School was looking to diversify its student body by offering scholarships to students from public universities. It was a golden opportunity, and Weiss jumped at it. “I always wanted to be in a profession where I could do some good, and as a journalist you can,” he says. “The law also allows one to do that. I wanted to be a trial lawyer primarily so I could go into court and argue what’s right.”
Weiss applied, was accepted and received the scholarship — which covered tuition, room and board plus a $1,000 stipend — on the condition that he perform in the top 20 percent of his class. No problem, he thought. Until he found out that almost all his 95 matriculating classmates in the fall of 1965 were on a similar scholarship. “Now there was some angst,” he admits.
He persevered, graduated cum laude and clerked for a judge on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis for a year before interviewing for a job with his current firm. In the early 1970s, Missouri had no public defender program; judges appointed attorneys to represent people who were charged with a crime but could not afford to pay for legal representation. Eager for trial experience, Weiss told the partners he would take the cases assigned to them. In his first two years, he tried eight felony cases before juries, which sparked his interest in criminal law. It also resulted in his first appearance in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974.
Five years earlier, one of Weiss’ indigent clients, James Drope, was accused of raping his wife with two friends after a night out drinking. On the second day of his trial, Drope shot himself in a suicide attempt. He survived after 21 days in the hospital but missed the rest of the trial and was ultimately convicted of the crime. Weiss filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that Drope’s absence from the trial was not voluntary. When that motion was denied, he filed another claiming Drope’s constitutional rights had been violated by the decision to continue the trial in his absence and by not giving Drope a psychological examination prior to the trial. Higher courts in Missouri upheld the trial court’s rejection of both claims, so Weiss petitioned the U. S. Supreme Court. Delivering a unanimous decision in Drope v. Missouri, the court agreed with Weiss that Drope had been denied due process and reversed the lower court’s ruling.
In 2007, the year after he took on the Kezer case, Weiss again appeared before the court in Washington, D.C., on a team representing William Weaver. A jury had convicted Weaver of first-degree murder in the killing of a prospective witness in a drug trial, but Weiss claimed the prosecutor’s closing statement had prejudiced jurors. The Missouri state courts had denied Weaver’s appeal, but a federal district court then overturned the sentence, agreeing with Weiss and his colleagues that the prosecutor’s “unfairly inflammatory” closing statement had violated Weaver’s right to due process.
The 8th Circuit upheld that ruling. When the state appealed to the nation’s highest court to review the case, the justices sided with Weiss and his fellow attorneys, upholding the decision to nullify Weaver’s death sentence. Weiss’s efforts helped spare Weaver’s life.
Since securing Josh Kezer’s release, Weiss has continued to work with The Innocence Project, assisted by attorneys from his firm, to exonerate four more men wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. George Allen was sentenced to 95 years in 1983 for the rape and murder of a 31-year-old woman. In 2012, after working on the case for five years, Weiss and his team were able to convince a judge with results from DNA testing to vacate Allen’s sentence and release him. David Robinson was convicted of shooting and killing a 36-year-old woman in 2000 and sentenced to life in prison primarily on the weight of testimony from jailhouse informants. Weiss and his team worked on the case intermittently for a dozen years, ultimately convincing a judge that the prosecutor had “knowingly presented false testimony” and recommending Robinson’s conviction be vacated in 2018, leading to his release.
Donald Nash was charged in 2008 with the murder of his girlfriend 26 years earlier and was convicted in 2009. Weiss and his team worked eight years on the case, eventually debunking the junk science the state had used to convict Nash and winning his exoneration in 2020. And in 1995, Lamar Johnson was convicted of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the death of a drug dealer he knew but claimed he did not kill and was sentenced to life without parole. Later, a key witness in the case who had identified Johnson as the killer said he was pressured by investigators to pick Johnson’s photo out of a lineup. Weiss and Jonathan Potts served as special prosecutors and lead counsel during a new trial in 2023 where they were able to prove Johnson’s innocence, secure his release and win the first-ever wrongful conviction case brought by a local prosecutor in St. Louis history.
Not all the innocence cases Weiss works on have happy endings. He and his team spent several years representing Marcellus Williams, who had been convicted in 2001 of killing a woman and sentenced to death despite a lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene. In 2023, Weiss filed a lawsuit against Missouri’s governor, claiming he had illegally dissolved a board of inquiry — appointed by his predecessor to review new DNA evidence — before it had issued a formal report. The circuit court decided in Williams’s favor, but the Missouri Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit and ruled the governor had acted within the law. The Midwest Innocence Project, the federal public defender’s office and even the prosecutor’s office — swayed by the new DNA evidence, even though it was later proven tainted — filed multiple appeals and petitions in an effort to stop the execution and set Williams free, but they were denied by judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Missouri executed Williams by lethal injection last fall.
Despite heartbreaks like this one, Weiss has found the means he sought to do good in his profession. As a lifelong Catholic, his religion has informed his legal practice. “Obviously in our Catholic faith, we try to do what’s right and find the truth,” he says. “That’s basically what we’re doing with our innocence work: searching for the truth and making sure justice is done.”
Potts attributes Weiss’s success to his compassion, honesty and integrity, which allow him to cultivate the trust necessary to forge connections with judges, juries, opposing counsel and above all his clients. “You’re finding people at their lowest, innocent of a terrible crime — murder — facing life in prison or execution,” Potts says. “It would be easy to rush through the conversation or dismiss them. That’s not Charlie. He will sit down with these people . . . and treat them with the same kindness, patience and respect he treats me. I know the clients deeply appreciate that respect.”
Indeed, 16 years after his release, Josh Kezer remains in frequent contact with Weiss, who has enlisted Kezer’s help vetting new innocence cases to take on. Since being freed himself, Kezer has advocated for the release of other men and women he believes have been wrongfully convicted. At the moment, that includes Leon Lamb, recently indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Mischelle Lawless, the woman Kezer was originally convicted of murdering. At Kezer’s urging, Weiss decided to represent Lamb along with a Missouri criminal defense attorney. Before that, Kezer brought Donald Nash’s case to Weiss. The two men talk several times a week. “He has a lot of knowledge of what goes on in prison, who’s innocent, and who’s not,” Weiss says.
The relationship has been a bedrock for Kezer, who credits Weiss with saving his life. “He didn’t just restore my life and freedom and family’s honor, he’s remained in my life,” Kezer says. “Whenever I’ve reached out to him, he’s been there. I love him like a father.”
Still, not all has gone well for Kezer since his release. For instance, he’d like to marry but says it’s hard to start a relationship with someone who discovers in a Google search that he was convicted of murder — even if he was eventually exonerated.
Weiss’s charitable work has extended beyond defending those wrongfully accused of murder and is rooted in his relationship with Notre Dame. Years ago, he organized a group of law school alumni who met on Saturday mornings at a Catholic parish in a low-income St. Louis neighborhood to provide free legal advice and representation to those who couldn’t afford it. The Law School honored Weiss in 2013 with the Rev. Michael D. McCafferty, CSC, Award, given to attorneys or faculty members who have rendered distinguished service to the University.
In his current role as chair of the Notre Dame Club of St. Louis scholarship committee, Weiss oversees the awarding of several four-year scholarships each year. It’s a fitting way for him to give back, he says.
While he used to take fly fishing trips to unwind, Weiss’s primary focus these days is cheering for the Fighting Irish football team and spending time with his wife, Suzie, their four children and 12 grandchildren, nine of whom live within a short drive in suburban St. Louis. “We always have somebody over at the house,” he says. “Playing with grandkids is my hobby now.”
He still goes into the office each weekday, works full time and says he continues to be invigorated by that: “I have no plans to retire.”
John Rosengren is a Pulitzer nominee and freelance journalist who lives in Minneapolis.