For David Lutz, 47 years in law has been long enough to see more jury trials than any New Brunswick lawyer will do again.
The 81-year-old Hampton lawyer has announced that his last cases will wrap up in December and he will be retiring. Lutz, who founded the firm Lutz Parish Gerrish in 1977, has a resume that includes time both as a defence lawyer and a Crown prosecutor and as many as 5,000 trials, including 100 jury trials.
“I have to do it sometime, so it might as well be now. I just finished three or four major cases, and it looked like a good note to go out on,” Lutz told Brunswick News recently. “I’m 81 years old. I just think that before I’m 82 and I start losing standing, and I start losing the ability to speak in the same manner in court that I’m used to, it’s better to go now.”
Lutz said he had his last family cases in the spring. He said his firm, with offices in St. Stephen, Saint Andrews, Hampton and Sussex, has “a great future.” The firm has 10 lawyers and will have two more students coming, he said.
“I’ve been there for 20 years, I was supposed to be David’s last student … since then we’ve had about 30 students between us,” said Carley Parish, the firm’s managing partner since 2014. “David will always be around, he loves the law and he loves giving back to the community.”
Lutz, a presence in the courtroom with thick-rimmed glasses, moustache and bowtie, was born in Erie, Pa., and had worked as a teacher in New York before immigrating to Canada in 1969 as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. After some time working for the province as a teacher, principal and social worker, he graduated from UNB’s law school in 1977. He received the Law Society of New Brunswick’s Franklin O. Leger Q.C. Award for outstanding service in 2015.
Parish said a case that “showed his courtroom personality” was the “Grand Manan V,” a 2006 case where he represented five men after a riot that ended with a house that they believed to be a crack den burnt to the ground. One was acquitted, three received conditional house arrest sentences and one received a conditional discharge.
“They ran out of jurors,” she said. “We got jurors from the dollar store, it was unheard of.”
Lutz said that the jury system is “the great truth leveller,” and that “no New Brunswick lawyer will do as many jury trials” as himself and the late Wilber MacLeod, who died in 2013, citing changes broadening the use of summary conviction.
“I’ve done jury trials for barfights, I’ve done jury trials for death threats … I had a jury trial for $600 worth of barn wood. But what happened in the 80s is there were too many jury trials,” he said.
He was also involved in notable guilty pleas, including for Justin Bourque, who pleaded guilty in 2014 to three counts of first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of RCMP officers in Moncton, and Karrson Bennett, who pleaded guilty last year to second-degree murder in the death of a two-year-old.
Last year, his work was upheld in a case where a defendant accused of attempted murder who pleaded guilty to a lesser charge appealed on the basis of “ineffective assistance of counsel,” only to have the Court of Appeal rule that the evidence against the defendant was “overwhelming.”
Lutz said his approach as a criminal defence lawyer is to first consider the Crown’s evidence disclosure to see whether prosecutors have a strong case.
“I don’t want someone telling me something that cannot be a defence,” Lutz said. “If it’s determined that there is no defence, what we have to start working on is presenting the best case to the court to obtain the best sentence.”
He also said he’s had “good fortune with the results of the polygraph,” saying while it is not evidence, it can help identify innocent clients in cases of framing or mistaken identity.
Over the course of his career he said there’s been an “epic” change in the status of women within family law, saying that when he started practicing, he said that “80 to 85 per cent of all marital homes” in the countryside were in the man’s name alone.
A controversial 1973 Supreme Court decision denying an Alberta woman a one-half interest in her ex-husband’s ranch led to a rush of new marital property legislation across the country, according to Lutz.
That was followed by an influx of female lawyers into law schools, he said, and after finding issues getting jobs in private practice, working for governments where they helped write new laws.
“That was the most important revolution in my time, and I saw it happening in front of me,” he said.
He said the second biggest change was equality for LGBTQ+ people.
As a Brunswick News social issues and legal columnist from 1997-2005, he said he wrote about issues encountered by same-sex couples going to prom, but “eventually the prejudice fell away” as more people encountered LGBTQ+ people in their own families.
Lutz said “one of my proudest moments” was in 2015, when he helped lead opposition at the Law Society of New Brunswick to accrediting graduates of Trinity Western University, a private Christian university in B.C. that had required students to sign a “community covenant” that was discriminatory to LGBTQ+ people. The motion failed on a tie but the university stopped requiring the covenant after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in 2018.
Parish said that one of Lutz’s greatest impacts, “and I don’t think he’ll admit this,” will be the number of students he’s brought along. She said he’s brought through 40 to 50 students in his career.
“To be principal and take on an articling student on top of your own practice is onerous, and we’ve had three at once,” Parish said. “Giving back in that way, I don’t know any other lawyer in the province that’s done that.”
Luke McGregor, chair of the Hampton and Area Chamber of Commerce, said that it was Lutz and other business owners who helped found the chamber in 1979.
“Dave was the chamber president for the first four years and has contributed both time and sponsorship to our activities ever since,” McGregor said.
He said he has “served his local community well,” including as chair of the Board of the Hampton Credit Union Committee, founding member of the Dr. V.A. Snow Centre and board member for AIDS Saint John.
Lutz quoted the phrase “From those to whom much is given, much is expected,” which has its roots in the Bible.
“If you’re a professional in the community, you’re making your living from the community … it’s morally correct to give back to the community, and we’ve done that in spades,” he said.
Lutz said his wife Brenda Lutz, a senior counsel at Canty Lutz Grant, is still practicing, but they want to travel. He said he has two “avocations,” or what he likes to do: listen to rock music and watch baseball.
He said of the 55 years he’s lived in Canada, he lived in Hampton for 48, notwithstanding time as a law student and working for the province.
“I could live anywhere in the world, I’ve been virtually everywhere,” Lutz said. “Hampton’s the best place I’ve ever been.”
With files from Brunswick News Archives
