By the end of his life, C. Paul Bradley, a widely admired public-interest lawyer and defense attorney, was a self-confessed agnostic who liked to recall how he spent part of his childhood as a Bible-quoting street corner evangelist in Mississippi.
With or without religion, Mr. Bradley, who died Tuesday, Oct. 3, in Rush University Medical Center after a lengthy illness at 66, never stopped using his considerable wit and charm to proselytize for justice and fairness for all people.
“I don’t think Paul had been in a church in years, but he was one of the most spiritual people I have ever known,” said former Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, now a judge.
“When I was public guardian, I would send down-and-out, elderly and mentally ill people who had little or no money to him when they needed a lawyer. Paul would always take them. He never asked how much money he could get, and he represented them with the same passion and care as he did for paying clients,” Murphy said.
Mr. Bradley was born in Wyandotte, Mich., the younger of two sons of William and Agnes Bradley.
“When he was a little boy, his father died, and his mother remarried a couple of years later,” said Mr. Bradley’s longtime girlfriend, Judy Dykes. “His stepfather took a job in Mississippi, and the family moved with him.”
He became a born-again Christian, Dykes said, but one troubled by Southern racial prejudice and inequality. By the time he attended Albion College in Michigan in the late 1950s, he was joining religion-based campus organizations that were active in social justice causes.
“He was already questioning his faith,” said John Aull, an executive at Chicago Youth Centers who knew Mr. Dykes then, “but he was dedicated to civil rights before it had become a full-blown movement.”
Mr. Bradley finished his undergraduate work at Roosevelt University in Chicago and went to John Marshall Law School. Becoming a lawyer in the early 1960s, he went to work for the Cook County public defender’s office and spent several years in Downstate Cairo with the state’s appellate public defender program for indigent people.
With a growing reputation for his legal skills, he went into private practice in Chicago, for many years sharing office space in the historic Monadnock Building with like-minded public-interest lawyers. One of his office mates was Michael Lefkow, slain husband of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow.
While he continued to take on poor and penniless clients, Mr. Bradley also represented paying customers, including crooked police officers, judges and politicians, former Ald. Wallace Davis Jr. among them.
“When he talked about his work, you understood the concept that everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense,” Aull said.
As a man who bought his suits from discount clothiers, Mr. Bradley did not exactly cut an elegant figure, but he put that part of his persona to work for his clients too.
“I have seen very few people with his level ability of cross-examination,” said Ellen Domph, another Monadnock Building attorney with whom he shared office space. “He would stand up in front of a jury looking like some sort of everyman next to other attorneys in flashy, expensive outfits.
“You could almost hear jurors thinking, `Who is this guy?’ But he was brilliant at this and so articulate, getting them on his side, then he would deliver the goods that helped his client.”
Ron Smith, a professor at John Marshall, said that in 1976 he talked Mr. Bradley into joining a slate of independent candidates in a special judicial election in a push to short-circuit the slate fielded by the Daley machine.
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As the election neared, Smith said, Mr. Bradley was horrified to learn he might actually win, protesting, “I don’t want to be a judge.”
Smith said Mr. Bradley was much relieved when he came in second, joking for years after, “The people have spoken, and I have been mandated to continue in private practice.”
Mr. Bradley had no immediate survivors. A memorial celebration will be held from noon to 3 p.m. Nov. 5 in HotHouse, 31 E. Balbo Drive, Chicago.
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