Not just a lawyer, a defender

Bob Focht is retiring, but he's still got some fight left in him.

By JAMAL THALJI, Times Staff Writer
Published December 30, 2007

Bob Focht, an assistant public defender, has a laugh as tells a story about his career during his recent retirement party at the Public Defender's Office in Dade City.
	[Mike Pease | Times]

ADVERTISEMENT [Courtesy of Bob Focht] Photo of Bob Focht as a Marine CH-46 helicopter pilot in Vietnam in Quang Tri in 1969. Focht is a former helicopter pilot known for his passion when it comes to defending clients or just making a point, and it was he who convinced a jury to spare cop-killer Alfredie Steele Jr.'s life. Focht is retiring at the end of this year.

His helicopter was shot down in Vietnam in 1969.

Three decades later, in 1998, it was colon cancer he was fighting.

Two years after that, he walked into an emergency room and had a heart attack. During a heart stress test two years later, they told him to go back to the hospital, where he got a double-bypass.

That Bob Focht still walks this earth is due to the characteristic that also made him one of Pasco's best trial lawyers.

Call it tenacity, or pugnacity.

"My wife," he said, "would call it stubbornness."

Whatever it is, it made for a great second act in Pasco jurisprudence. After two decades in private practice, Focht rejoined the Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender's Office in 1997 at the tender age of 53.

Until his retirement Friday, he spent the last 10 years representing some of Pasco's most notorious - and not so notorious - criminals.

"He knows what the job is, and it doesn't matter if they march onto the courthouse steps and hang him," said fellow public defender Tom Hanlon. "He'll do his job like he did in Vietnam when they were shooting at him."

Focht traveled the country as an Air Force brat. His father, Maj. Robert Focht, never liked to argue much.

His mother, Gloria?

"I guess it's part of the genetics," Bob Focht said. "My mother used to argue. We argued. Not fight. Argue."

He graduated from the University of South Florida in 1966, then married his wife, Sally. He joined the military to fly, just like his dad. The Marine pilot flew all kinds of mission in his CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter.

One day in 1969, the mission was to survive.

He managed to land his shot-up bird. One gunner was dead. His wingman picked up the survivors in a hail of bullets.

It was later, sitting outside the group commander's office, that it hit him:

He almost died that day.

"I can't light a cigarette I'm shaking so damn bad," he said. "But it was all adrenaline while it was going on."

- - -

In 1973, he graduated from Stetson University College of Law and joined the Public Defender's Office in New Port Richey.

For a while, he was the public defender in New Port Richey. Then Focht went out on his own.

It never felt right.

"Even all those years when I was in private practice," he said. "I felt an affinity that some part of me was still a public defender.

"I don't mean a part of me was always a defense lawyer. I mean a part of me was always a public defender."

- - -

In 1997, he became a public defender once again.

Focht has tried first capital cases. Then there are the cases he's really known for, like that of James Tareek Bettis Jr.

In 2000, Bettis accidentally ran over and injured a 7-year-old Zephyrhills boy but drove off before turning himself in. Bettis was sentenced to prison. Focht helped get that overturned.

In Dade City, in the Pasco County Courthouse, the case is known for something else: It's why Focht and another Pasco legal legend, retired Assistant State Attorney Phil Van Allen, stopped speaking.

Focht thought the state wanted a harsher sentence for Bettis, a black teen, than others had received for similar crimes.

"He is a guy that whatever he believes in, he'll go to any length," Hanlon said of Focht. "He just doesn't give a damn what people think about him."

- - -

Young lawyers, Focht said, fall into a routine.

"It's easy to get into a rut of being afraid to push or upset the state or the court," he said. "But when you walk in, it's going to be a fight."

The job of a public defender isn't just to fight for the client - it's to do what's best for the client. That can mean making a deal.

"There are people who innately see where two sides are going to agree in the middle somewhere," Focht said. "I'm not good at it."

What he is good at is the other part of the job: going to trial, fighting for the client, even when they did do it.

"I've walked people out the door I damn well knew they did exactly what they were charged with," Focht said. "I just knew the state couldn't prove it."

- - -

Sometimes the job is to save the life of the guilty.

Focht did just that for Alfredie Steele Jr.

The 23-year-old Lacoochee man was sentenced in April to life in prison for the 2003 sniper-style slaying of Pasco sheriff's Lt. Charles "Bo" Harrison.

After Steele was convicted, it was Focht alone who defended him from a death sentence. The defense put on a parade of family and acquaintances to humanize the cop killer for the jury. Focht kept repeating this for the jury: "That's just Fredie being Fredie."

Said Hanlon: "You couldn't have coined a better phrase."

Focht, he said, almost broke down during his final plea to the jury to spare Steele's life.

"There's still stuff we don't know, but that doesn't make Fredie innocent," Focht said. "Had he gotten death, it would have been harder to handle.

- - -

Focht spent his last months at the Public Defender's Office in New Port Richey training new lawyers - and cherry picking tough cases. Why would he want to do that at age 63?

"With the run of the mill cases you can fight or plead," he said. "The real nasty ones, you have no choice but to fight."

Focht and his wife still live in Land O'Lakes. Their four children are grown. But he's already planning his next "fight":

He wants to hike all 2,175 miles of the Appalachian Trail in 2009. But he'll be 65 by then, and with his medical history?

"I hear from my wife and others that something could happen," Focht said. "But I'm not gonna live forever anyway."

Jamal Thalji can be reached at thalji@sptimes.com or 727 869-6236.

[Last modified December 29, 2007, 19:56:38]