Former convict Moman Pruiett found remarkable success in Oklahoma as a lawyer for the damned.
Moman Pruiett loved to tell about the time he received a telegram from a man accused of murder: “Have $5,000. Will you defend me?” The lawyer quickly wired back, “Am leaving on next train with three eyewitnesses.”
Although Pruiett denied the incident ever really happened, lawyers and judges who knew him might have wondered. This flamboyant, aggressive man stood out even among the multitude of colorful characters who pioneered the law in rough-and-tumble Oklahoma and Indian territories. Pruiett was loud, brash, reckless and violent. He was a jailbird, too. He was a pain in the neck to most of his colleagues, to a good many lawmen and to more than a few Western judges. He was rude, insulting and, especially in his later years, a notable drunk. And he might have been the most successful criminal defense attorney who ever walked into a courtroom.
Certainly he was as fine a hand with a frontier jury as there ever was. The story goes that he defended 343 persons in murder trials and won 303 acquittals, an astonishing record. Of his remaining murder trial clients, only one was sentenced to death, and even that sentence was nullified by presidential clemency.
Pruiett was an unlikely candidate for admission to the bar. Born Moorman Pruiett on an Ohio River steamboat in 1872, he had only about a year of formal education. Moorman was his mother’s family name, but after disgracing it by serving two stints in prison, he changed his first name to Moman.
At 16, while working for a railroad, he became involved in a scheme to forge freight bills and was sentenced to two years in the Arkansas State Prison at Little Rock. Released on probation some seven months later, he took an interest in the law when hired as a janitor by criminal lawyers in Paris, Texas. But at 18 he was convicted of rolling a drunk and sentenced to five years in the Texas State Prison at Rusk. He denied the charge. “As sure as I live I’ll make you sorry,” he supposedly said. “I’ll empty your damned jails, and I’ll turn the murderers and thieves aloose in your midst. But I’ll do it in a legal way.”
Paroled after serving only two years, he still never forgot the promise he had made in court. He began to study law in earnest in the office of a lawyer who had befriended him. In 1896 Pruiett was sworn into the bar before the federal court in Paris and soon set up a practice in Paul’s Valley, Indian Territory. Around the turn of the 20th century, one of his clients, a poor black man named Charles Bias, received the death penalty. But Pruiett headed to Washington, D.C., where he got President William McKinley to change Bias’ sentence to life in prison.
Pruiett also spent a good deal of time in Washington lobbying for Oklahoma statehood, which finally was granted in 1907. Grateful delegates to the state constitutional convention voted to name a county for Pruiett. Ever loud and pugnacious, however, he got embroiled in a countyseat contest and forfeited the goodwill of many of the delegates. And that is how Moman County disappeared from the Oklahoma map and became Creek County.
Once Oklahoma achieved statehood, Pruiett began practicing in Oklahoma City. During the ensuing years, he would do most of his legal work in Oklahoma but would try murder cases in other states as well.
His clients did not always make it easy for him. In Ada, Okla., in the spring of 1909, “Deacon Jim” Miller, the most prolific killer-for-hire in the history of the West, was in jail, accused of murder. Miller had slain an Ada man, Gus Bobbitt, for hire. Once in jail, Miller annoyed the town by sending out regularly for steak and generally living high on the hog. Then he hired Pruiett for the defense, which convinced the good citizens of Ada they were unlikely to see justice done.
And so a group of Ada’s leading citizens visited the jail and extracted Miller and the two men, Jesse West and Joe Allen, who had hired him for the job. All ended up swinging from the rafters of the stable. Hearing of the lynching of Miller, Pruiett is said to have exploded, “The sons-of-bitches down there beat me out of a $5,000 fee.”
The following February, Agnes Gilbert, in the midst of doing the family wash, put a bullet in her husband. When helpful citizens picked up her dying mate to carry him inside the house, Agnes demurred: “You better lay it on the porch….You ain’t goin’ to take him in thar, and bloody up my nice clean bed.” Pruiett damned her husband to the jury as a worthless, abusive sot. Even when she was found guilty, he managed a reversal on appeal, and a second jury bought the violins and the pathos. Agnes was free—and free to accept the proceeds of a life insurance policy on her husband, which she shared, of course, with Pruiett.
The lawyer’s detractors cited his willingness to create and destroy evidence, encourage perjury and unleash anti-Semitic tirades. Pruiett was also willing to use a pistol. When a ne’er-do-well named Charley Wiseman showed up wearing a coat that Pruiett had given to his father, Pruiett put three neat holes in Wiseman and reclaimed the coat. As soon as he could walk again, Wiseman left town.
Leaving town was not an option for one Dr. Waller Threlkeld, whom Pruiett had met in an Ada hotel lobby. The doctor was full of booze, and Pruiett had also been drinking. Irritated because Pruiett had successfully defended a man who had killed a friend of Threlkeld’s, the good doctor hauled out a pistol, shoved it against Pruiett’s brisket and pulled the trigger. The weapon misfired, and by the time the doctor got off another round, Pruiett was shooting back. After taking four bullets, the doctor at last gave up the fight, but he, too, would live to tell about it.
Not so “Negro Joe” Patterson, once described as a pistol-packing “notorious character and bad actor.” Patterson and Pruiett got crossways one night in the fall of 1921, down in Joe’s Oklahoma City bootleg joint, and Patterson ended up in the morgue. “Self defense,” said the coroner’s jury. It may have helped some that the presiding justice instructed the jury that it was their civic duty to come in with that verdict.
Booze and financial misfortune haunted the lawyer in his later years. Much of Pruiett’s brilliance was gone, largely due to his preoccupation with John Barleycorn. Cited for contempt when he appeared in court drunk in 1928, he was disbarred in 1935 for what amounted to extortion, offering to excuse a defendant from a civil action in return for $5,000. Though the penalty was reduced to a year’s suspension, Pruiett was in steep decline.
The end came in December 1945. He was living on a $40-a-month pension in a 50- cent flophouse in Oklahoma City. After being admitted to a local hospital, he died of pneumonia on the 17th. There could be no appeal.
Originally published in the October 2006 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
