F. Lee Bailey (born June 10, 1930, Waltham, Massachusetts—died June 3, 2021, Atlanta, Georgia) was an American lawyer who served as defense counsel in several of the most widely publicized criminal trials of the 20th century. His clients included the American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and the American former professional football player O.J. Simpson.
Bailey graduated from Kimball Union Academy, a private boarding school in Meriden, New Hampshire, in 1950. He attended Harvard University for two years before dropping out to join the U.S. Navy and then the U.S. Marine Corps. Because of the experience he gained working as a legal officer in the Marines, he was admitted to Boston University Law School without having finished college. After graduating from law school in 1960, he entered private practice. He soon was hired to handle the appeal of the murder conviction of Sam Sheppard, an Ohio physician who in 1954 had been convicted of killing his wife. In 1966 Bailey successfully argued before the Supreme Court that Sheppard had been denied a fair trial, and, on retrial later that year, Sheppard was acquitted.
Bailey also defended Albert DeSalvo, who in 1965 had confessed to being the Boston Strangler, the serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least 11 women in the Boston area between 1962 and 1964. DeSalvo was eventually convicted in 1967 on charges of sexual assault and sentenced to life imprisonment. (He was murdered in prison in 1973.) Bailey later successfully defended Army Capt. Ernest L. Medina in the latter’s court martial for his alleged involvement in the mass murder of hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese villagers by U.S. soldiers in the 1968 My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War. In 1976 Bailey, serving as defense attorney in the trial of Hearst, failed to gain an acquittal for his client. Hearst had been kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) militant group and had subsequently participated in a bank robbery staged by the SLA.
In 1994 Bailey became a member of the legal team defending Simpson, who was accused of having killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. During the high-profile trial that followed, the attorneys representing Simpson—including such veteran lawyers as Alan Dershowitz, Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., and Robert Shapiro—became known as the “Dream Team.” The Simpson defense was based largely on the grounds that evidence against him had been mishandled and that many members of the Los Angeles Police Department—particularly detective Mark Fuhrman, an investigator of the slayings—were racists. Bailey’s intense cross-examination of Fuhrman was considered one of the turning points in the case. Simpson’s legal team won an acquittal for him in 1995.
Bailey’s reputation as a lawyer suffered considerably in the early 21st century. In 2001 Bailey was disbarred in the state of Florida, partly on the grounds of having misappropriated client funds and having made false testimony under oath. He was disbarred on similar grounds in Massachusetts in 2003. He later relocated to Maine, but his efforts to obtain a license to practice law there were ultimately rejected by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court in 2014.