Hella Nation - Evan Wright [86]
Growing up in Brooklyn, Knoller was a straight arrow who dreamed of becoming an FBI agent. “Marjorie didn’t go with the crowd,” says her mother, Harriet. “She skipped her high school graduation. She told me, ‘Mom, I’m not going. All the kids in my class are on drugs.’”
She met Robert Noel when she was thirty-two, a divorced law school graduate just starting her career at the firm where Noel was already a big shot. They made a lunch date one day and moved in together a week later. By May 1988, they had both resigned their jobs and hung out their own shingle. They moved away from the commercial-contract and tax law that had been Noel’s area of expertise and took on more pro bono work. Then, in 1994, their life was to change drastically when they were referred to what seemed like an interesting case.
The client was a man named John Cox, a guard at Pelican Bay State Prison who had recently broken ranks with fellow corrections officers by testifying on behalf of inmates who’d been brutalized in the prison. Now Cox was being harassed on the job and wanted to sue the California Department of Corrections. Knoller and Noel leaped at the chance to represent him. Within a few months they abandoned what remained of their commercial-law practice to concentrate on representing prison guards in grievances against the CDC.
“The good Lord blessed our family by bringing Bob and Marjorie into our lives,” says Monica Bermender, who was represented by Noel and Knoller in a First Amendment federal court case. “They believed in me and in our family when nobody else would.”
Despite their devotion to their cause, Knoller and Noel racked up an uneven, some say abysmal, record. They lost the harassment case for their first client, Cox, and he subsequently hanged himself. Susan Beck, who analyzed their cases against the CDC in an article in The Recorder, a Bay Area legal newspaper, concluded that Knoller and Noel often made basic procedural mistakes and developed legal strategies based on unsupported conspiracy theories. “Noel comes across as someone who is competent, but it appears to me there have been serious problems with his conduct on some cases,” says Neal Sanders, an expert in prison law.
The fact was that neither Knoller nor Noel had much experience trying criminal cases. Entering the miasma of the prison universe, they were clearly in over their heads. “Prison is like its own ecosystem, with its own rules,” says attorney Russell Clanton. “Life inside the wire is unlike anything most people outside of it can even conceive.”
The low point of their legal career came in 1997, when they defended a Pelican Bay guard accused of colluding with the Aryan Brotherhood to set up child molesters for beatings and murder. Their defense failed, and not only was the guard found guilty but one of the inmates they called as a witness was subsequently murdered.
“It was devastating for us,” says Knoller. “I was in shock.”
Schneider was among the witnesses they called in that case and was presumably marked for death like the other inmate. “We sent a letter to the CDC informing them of our concerns for Paul’s safety,” says Knoller.
IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME that Schneider’s dreams of once again