Defense Lawyers Put Lives on Hold for Haun

Away from the courthouse and pressures of trying to save a suspected killer from death row, Susan Olson finds comfort puttering in her Ojai vegetable garden and meandering through the surrounding orange groves.

Three miles down the road, her co-counsel and good friend, Neil Quinn, tinkers with unfinished projects around the hillside home he built with his own hands.

They are a well-matched team--two locals who grew up in Ventura, went to college, dropped out, and eventually earned law degrees.

Now, the two public defenders have been paired, for the first time in their long legal careers, to handle one of the biggest cases in Ventura County history: the murder trial of Diana Haun.

It has been a taxing case, one in which the defendant could lose her life if convicted of killing the wife of her longtime lover, Michael Dally. For the lawyers, it has meant countless hours away from their homes to mount a defense.

“There are only two things left now--the family and the case,” Olson said. “Everything else has to wait.”

Olson, 47, and Quinn, 45, were assigned to defend Haun more than a year ago after she was arrested in connection with the disappearance of Ventura homemaker Sherri Dally.

The defendant is facing charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy for allegedly killing the 35-year-old day-care center operator. Michael Dally is charged with the same offenses and will stand trial later.

In the past five weeks, defense attorneys have waged a battle in court to convince a jury that it was not Haun, a 36-year-old grocery clerk from Port Hueneme, who abducted and killed Sherri Dally.

Last week, they began calling their own witnesses to try to prove that point, suggesting that someone else was responsible for the crimes. They could conclude their case as early as Tuesday.

“It is a difficult job at times,” Quinn said Friday after a long day in court. “I haven’t seen the outside in a while.”

The hard work they have put into Haun’s case is characteristic of Quinn and Olson, whom friends and colleagues describe as zealously dedicated to their work.

“They represent the very best in the legal profession,” said the county’s top public defender, Kenneth I. Clayman. “This is a cohesive team--money couldn’t buy better.”

As veteran deputy public defenders, they have gained reputations as hard-working idealists who would never turn away a case, no matter how difficult or time-consuming.

“What they do they don’t see as a job,” said Deputy Public Defender Howard Asher. “They see it as a calling.”

Olson and Quinn are two of the most respected public defenders in the office, Asher said, both for their intelligence and their willingness to put time and effort into the most difficult cases.

“It’s a seven-day-a-week job,” Asher said. “The mental strain of being in court every day, knowing the potential consequences, is something known only by those who do it. . . . Nobody wants to be the attorney with the client on death row.”

Asher speaks from experience.

Four years ago, he and Olson defended Mark Scott Thornton, the Thousand Oaks teenager accused of killing Westlake nurse Kellie O’Sullivan.

After a lengthy trial that left both lawyers exhausted, Thornton was convicted and sentenced to death. He still keeps in touch with both Asher and Olson, who consider him a friend.

“Mark is unusual for someone in my career,” Olson said. “I really saw some humanity in him, I really like the kid, and I recognize the terrible thing he did. I feel very sad about the way his life has ended up.”

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It is her compassion and enormous belief in the role the public defender plays--to aggressively protect an individual’s rights regardless of his or her ability to pay--that has given her credibility in the system, colleagues say.

“In order for the system to work, you have to have attorneys who are willing to work with what some people view as the scum of the earth,” said Deputy Public Defender Robert Dahlstedt. “That is what Neil and Sue are all about.”

But the pair are not without their critics. Several prosecutors contacted for this story declined to comment on the record about either attorney for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Haun’s trial is underway. Another lawyer quipped that unless he had something nice to say, he’d rather not comment at all.

In the past, Quinn and Olson have come under fire. She was criticized after the Thornton case for not coming out directly and acknowledging that he was the killer. Instead, defense attorneys tried to pick apart the prosecution’s case in hopes the jury would find Thornton not guilty of the special circumstances required for a death sentence.

While critics acknowledge Quinn’s quick wit and intelligence, they also say that at times he rambles in court and sometimes fails to present a concise argument.

During jury selection in the Haun case, two prospective jurors--who said they were turned off by Quinn’s style of presentation--responded that they could not be impartial because they did not believe Haun would be adequately represented during the trial.

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Defense lawyers in murder cases are often the targets of criticism. And Quinn and Olson, as veteran trial attorneys, are no strangers to high-profile cases.

In recent years, they have handled some of the most well-known cases--defendants by the names of Mannes and Pohlmeier, as well as Thornton..

But Haun’s case has eclipsed them all.

So much attention has been paid to it, in fact, that the attorneys fought to have the trial moved outside Ventura County on the grounds that heavy publicity locally had tainted Haun’s right to a fair trial.

Their argument proved persuasive. Judge Frederick A. Jones ruled that a Santa Barbara County jury should be imported by bus daily to the Ventura courthouse to decide the case.

But the attention to the case has not waned. Articles about the opening of the trial were circulated nationwide. And crowds continue to line up in front of the courtroom every day. The bailiff on several occasions has had to turn people away because the 56 seats were taken.

“In a lot of cases, you get a lot of people in for the opening statement and they drift away and come back for closing arguments--not this case,” Asher said.

Long before the case came to trial, Olson and Quinn used a variety of legal maneuvers to try to get at least some of the charges against their client dismissed.

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They attacked the prosecution’s decision to seek the death penalty, arguing that the decision-making process was arbitrary and discriminated against race and gender.

They also criticized the manner in which the district attorney presented Haun’s case to the Ventura County Grand Jury, successfully arguing that the lying-in-wait allegation should be thrown out because prosecutors improperly instructed the panel on the legal definition of lying in wait.

The allegation was later reinstated. But last week, the defense team brought a renewed motion to dismiss that allegation on the grounds that prosecutors failed to prove it during the trial.

Jones has taken the matter under submission.

Although they have never tried a case together before, and have quite different styles in the courtroom, Quinn and Olson say their partnership has been a good one.

“Sue probably tends to want to see that all the ducks are in order and approaches things as a more precise series of surgical incisions,” Quinn said.

“Neil has a very quick intuitive intelligence and he is willing to rely on that where some of us, myself included, are used to mulling things over,” Olson said.

“I would say I am much more conservative than Neil,” she said.

“I am not one to shy away from a challenge,” he said.

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Both attorneys entered the legal profession after graduating from local high schools--Quinn went to Buena High and Olson to Ventura High--and after leaving college for other pursuits.

Olson dropped out of UCLA after a semester and got married.

Quinn left UC Santa Barbara after four years and a stand-out athletic career playing on the university’s water polo team. He wandered for a while after leaving Santa Barbara, working in a sawmill in Idaho and picking oranges in Florida.

Eventually, he and Olson both found their way to Ventura College of Law. She graduated in 1975 and went to work the next year for the public defender’s office. Quinn graduated in 1979 and began working there in 1984.

Both are now married to nonlawyers and have children. Olson and her husband, Ojai optometrist Mike Jauregui, have a 9-year-old son. Quinn and his wife, Deborah, a Ventura schoolteacher, have two daughters, ages 13 and 7.

Outside work, the families are quite close. They recently bought land together in the California desert. They enjoy the outdoors and share a common interest in rock climbing.

But their personal time has been put on hold, they say, due to the demands of handling a capital murder case.

“Ordinarily, you can balance a family and this job,” Quinn said. “But when you are in a case like this, you can’t balance. It doesn’t work.”

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During a 20-minute court recess last week, Olson used a phone in the corner of the courtroom to call her son, Kevin, and find out how the first day of school went.

“There is not a day when I don’t wonder how he is doing and what he is doing,” Olson said. “One thing that I have tried to do over the years is give him a sense of the importance of what I do.

“I believe he understands that there will be times of very intense work in my career and other times where it won’t be as busy.”

It is a juggling act, to be sure, and Olson has considered leaving it all to simply be with her family, she said.

But those thoughts are “balanced by the challenge--by the sense that I have--that people charged with these types of crimes need people to represent them,” she said.

“I honestly feel that the name ‘public defender’ describes what I do,” Olson says. But, she adds, “I also like a good fight.”

Not surprisingly, Quinn shares her views.

“Right now, I would describe it as very taxing,” he said of his work. But he added, “It’s a necessary job. It is something that keeps the system honest.”