“A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” So said Frank Lloyd Wright, and though he is probably wrong about doctors – their mistakes come back to haunt them -- the case can be just as bad for lawyers. The attorney for Kennedy cousin Michael Shakel who represented him in a 2002 murder trial is now being called incompetent. Because the lawyer, Michael Sherman, did not win the case, he is open to the recrimination that Shakel lost the case because he was poorly represented.
 
Shakel was on trial for the murder of his neighbor. Sherman was lambasted by Shakel and his new attorney for not doing more to bar a tape that admitted Shakel had masturbated in a tree on the property of his neighbor the night she was murdered.
 
The new defense attorney, Hubert Santos, said, “You knew up to that point the general consensus was you were going to get an acquittal. You knew at that point you were in trouble.”
 
The tape reveals Shakel to seem guilty and defensive, but he explains that this was because he had masturbated in the tree, not because he murdered anybody. The lead investigator, Frank Garr, showed up at the property of an author, Richard Hoffman, who was writing a book on the murder, and demanded the tape.
 
“He said we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said Hoffman. Garr also said, “I’m not returning to Connecticut without what I came for.”
 
Sufficiently intimidated, the author handed over the tape, which Shakel says ought to have been barred from the trial. He believes it ultimately cost him the case.
 
As for another recrimination against Sherman, he did not let Shakel take the stand. Sherman said that Shakel is intelligent, “but he does have a temper and he does get excited,” and he thought putting him on the stand would have done more damage than good.
 
In his defense, Sherman was also able to bar Shakel’s ex-wife from writing a book about having married a killer.
 
“It would be very damning,” said Sherman. “Somehow we were able to stop that.”
 
A lost case may cost more than the immediate disappointment: it may linger to haunt a lawyer.