(C) Arizona Mirror
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The ghost on his shoulder [1]
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Date: 2025-08-11
“May it please the court, my name is James Hamm,” he began, just like any attorney pleading his case. Then the narrative took a turn.
“I stand before this court having committed a violent crime in 1974,” he said.
Hamm was appealing to the Arizona Supreme Court to let him into the Arizona State Bar, the agency that licenses and regulates attorneys.
By all assessments, Hamm had a brilliant legal mind. But he was also a convicted murderer, recently paroled, and the Supreme Court was grasping for a reason to keep him out of the profession without setting a hard and fast rule that murderers could never be lawyers.
It had already been 31 years since the crime, and Hamm was a model for rehabilitation: an honors college student, a law school graduate, a happily married man. But, still, a convicted murderer.
Hamm was 25 in 1974, a divinity school dropout doing what a lot of young men of his generation did. He was hitchhiking around the country and living communally with friends. He eked out an existence at a Tucson bar, selling nickel bags of “grass,” as marijuana was called back then.
But one of those deals got away from him. In a fit of panic and overreaction, he shot a man, Willard Morley, in the back of the head, ending one life and uprooting his own.
“My victim was a young man just like I was, then on a path that inevitably would have led into the criminal justice system, into prisons,” he wrote later in a legal brief. “He no longer has any opportunity to turn his life around and to return to his home, his family and his community as a contributing member. I took that opportunity from him.”
Some things are hard to live down. Despite rehabilitation, despite remorse, despite superior intelligence, Hamm’s life has been one of scandal.
It was a scandal when his prison sentence was commuted in 1989. It was a scandal when he was admitted into Arizona State University’s law school, and another scandal when ASU hired him to teach classes as an adjunct professor after he graduated. And it was a scandal when he passed the Bar exam and petitioned the State Bar for admission.
So, it did not please the court that he was standing before them. The justices denied his appeal.
There was this light around James. I can’t describe it. And I knew we were going to be friends, we were going to have a relationship.
Instead of becoming a lawyer, he settled into work as a paralegal, prized for his research and his credibility with imprisoned or soon-to-be-imprisoned clients. And he worked with his wife, Donna, for Middle Ground Prison Reform, the advocacy group they co-founded to nudge the jails and jailers toward more humane conditions.
Judging by the number of people who did not return phone calls or emails for this story, he is still a polarizing figure. The scandals have neither been forgotten nor forgiven.
Hamm doesn’t begrudge those who think ill of him. He did the worst thing you can do to another person. He feels he deserves it.
“Willard sits on his shoulder every day,” Donna said. “And whenever he’s feeling sorry for himself, whenever he’s feeling life is unfair, he hears Willard say, ‘Hey, buddy, look what you did to me.’ And that’s what keeps him steady and going and not complaining.”
The lawyers he worked with uniformly describe him as brilliant.
“He made a huge difference, he and Donna, with their expertise helping prisoners and their families deal with the (Arizona) Department of Corrections,” said criminal defense attorney Lori Voepl.
At the edge of 78, however, the brilliance is fading. Hamm is in the early stages of dementia, and he wanted to sit down and tell as much of his story as he could still remember.
The truth gets blurry
Murder not only obliterates a life, it blurs realities, and it traumatizes everyone, including the killer.
And if what Hamm remembers, and what Donna remembers for him, differ from what the court record says, then maybe things just look different from different vantage points. No account is completely unbiased, not even the prosecutor’s.
Hamm is a large man with a gray beard and a stony gaze he cultivated in prison for self-defense. But as soon as he starts to talk, the façade lifts and Hamm is friendly, affable, intentionally nerdy.
He grew up in Kansas, and it lingers in his voice. He came from a family of eight brothers and three sisters, which might have made it easy to get lost. He got lost a few times, dropping out of college twice, once because it bored him. He decided he would be a minister and got a scholarship to a Bible college, even preaching at a local church on Sundays. He married young and fathered a son, and then his mother died and he dropped out of school again. When things fell apart completely, he divorced and hit the road, thumbs out.
By the time he reached Tucson, he was recovering from a broken wrist — he doesn’t remember what from — with a pin in his arm and enough pain to keep him from doing honest work.
So he spent his days drinking beer at a bar on Fourth Street, where he was known by the name “Country,” a long-haired, bearded hippie doing the dishonest work of connecting bar goers with plastic baggies of weed.
It was obvious who was looking to buy, he says, so he would make the connections and make a little money from the transactions.
“It wasn’t like I was a big drug dealer,” he said.
At the bar, he met Garland Wells.
“Garland was the kind of guy that people didn’t get friendly with,” Hamm remembers. “He handled himself in an aggressive way… I didn’t get offended at the things he would say and the things he did.”
For example, Garland once took out a gun and set it on the table and then started staring at Hamm.
“I just didn’t react in any way at all,” Hamm says. “He could tell that I wasn’t intimidated, and I think that is when he and I sort of became friendly to each other.”
One day, two young men from Missouri showed up at the bar, looking to score some grass they could take home and sell to college students. They didn’t want the nickel bags that Hamm typically peddled, telling him they wanted to buy 20 pounds. That was more than Hamm had ever sold, and it made him nervous. He asked Garland to go along with him as protection. Garland had a gun, and he lent another to Hamm.
The court record describes the deal as a rip-off from the start. “That wasn’t my thing,” Hamm says, and he still swears he only wanted to make a deal. “I think Garland was more in the line of robbing people,” he said.
On Sept. 7, 1974, they met up with the buyers, Willard Morley, 23, and Zane Staples, 19. Hamm and Garland got in the back seat of their car and headed toward the home of their drug source. A friend followed them in a van for added security.
Then, as they were driving, Garland pulled out his gun, stuck it between the front seat and the passenger door, and shot Staples in the back.
“Garland pulls the trigger and shoots this guy,” Hamm said. “The driver freaks out and things are just going to shit. I’m telling the driver to pull over and stop. He does, and he’s going crazy.”
Hamm panicked. When Morley leaned forward, Hamm thought he was going for a gun and shot him in the head, twice. According to court records, he also put a bullet in Staples as he jumped out of the car. Garland then chased Staples. The car started rolling when Morley’s foot came off the brake, and Hamm climbed over the front seat to stop it.
Minutes later, Garland came back to the car, explaining that Staples “was a hard fucker to kill.” They emptied out the two men’s pockets and took the $1,400 they meant to spend on marijuana. There were no guns on the men they killed. Then they flagged down their friend in the van and drove back into town.
Hamm hitchhiked back to California to stay with his sister for a few days, then came back to Tucson and tried to act as if nothing had happened. But the van driver had cooperated with police, and on Sept. 13, while Hamm was walking along Fourth Street on his way from the bar to where he was staying, the van pulled up alongside and offered him a ride. Cops jumped out of the back of the van and arrested him.
Hamm was allowed to plead straight up to first-degree murder for killing Morley. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the robbery and other charges. Garland pleaded to Staples’ murder. They were both sentenced to life in prison with a chance of parole after 25 years.
I think the man borders on genius. I think James Hamm is the poster child for rehabilitation, and if we can't see fit to admit him to practice law based on his years of rehabilitation and service to the community, then is there really a system by which someone can be rehabilitated? – Defense attorney Ulises Ferragut
In December 1974, Hamm was taken to the Central Unit at the state prison in Florence to serve his sentence.
That unit, which closed in 2022, looked like something out of a classic prison movie. That is to say, it was like Dante’s Hell: Tiers of barred cells stacked high around a central courtyard. Every time someone new entered, hundreds of prisoners started shouting and hooting and banging on the cell bars.
Hamm says he was “screamed” into prison. The guards strip-searched him right in the central courtyard in full view of everyone. The prisoners roared their displeasure or appreciation. The guards handed him his prison clothes and led him to a cell.
“There’s no brochure that they hand you first,” Hamm said. “You know that you are going into a place full of predators.”
He learned quickly how to put on a tough front.
“It’s more with the eyes and the air you project,” he said. He became a master of nonverbal communication.
Early on, another prisoner showed up in front of his cell, asking what Hamm had, with the intention of taking it. Hamm stared him down, letting his expression convey his message.
“If there wasn’t a door between us, he was going over that rail,” he said. The man got the message and walked away.
Hamm had plenty of time to think.
“I was pretty much a nice guy until the crime,” he said. He paused for a long moment. “After the crime I knew I was mentally disturbed. What I did rocked me.”
He knew he had to rebuild his self.
“I needed to build a personality that I could live with and that would help me function in prison.”
And hopefully serve him if he ever got out.
Finding light in darkness
In 1981, Donna Leone was a justice of the peace in Flagstaff, an elected position that does not require a law degree, even if the position-holder is called “judge.” And since she had to sentence people to jail, she got some do-gooder idea in her head that she ought to spend a weekend in jail to see what it was like.
Her political colleagues talked her out of it, saying it was too dangerous. Instead, she took a tour of the Central Unit in Florence with a state legislator and a sociology professor from Northern Arizona University.
They were met with the usual catcalls, perhaps more so because there was a woman among the visitors. The state legislator laughed at Donna’s discomfort, until the professor pointed out that some of the prisoners were likely ogling him, too.
After the visit, they attended a class in the prison, taught by the NAU professor, where prisoners and correctional officers were studying side by side. The professor noted that two of the prisoners in the class were doing graduate level work; one of them was James Hamm.
“He was very centered, and almost spiritual,” Donna remembers. He didn’t try to ingratiate himself. “He did not give off a vibe that he should be in prison.”
“It wasn’t love at first sight,” she said, but as they took leave of the students, she looked back to where Hamm was standing in the doorway
“There was this light around James,” she said. “I can’t describe it. And I knew we were going to be friends, we were going to have a relationship.”
She wrote to him, and they decided to get to know each other. Their visits turned into legal sessions, and that was how Middle Ground started. They filed and won lawsuits, first on prisoner mail, and then on prisoner property, both of which were often thrown away. When the Department of Corrections forbade visitors from bringing pencil and paper into the prisons, they would go into the public restrooms and collect brown paper towels, then borrow a pen from a correctional officer and write up motions and affidavits, which Donna would take home and type up.
They married at the prison in 1987.
Donna had first suggested that Hamm apply for commutation of his sentence in 1982, after serving seven years. But he refused, saying he had not yet come to grips with his crime. In 1989, after serving 14 years, he was awarded a commutation by Gov. Rose Mofford.
But it was rescinded before Hamm could get out of prison. Once the media got hold of the news that Hamm and two other convicted murderers might be released, Mofford’s advisors lost nerve, fearing it would hurt her chances for reelection, and pulled back. Hamm and Donna took the state to court.
Donna got a tip that one of Mofford’s advisers, Ralph Milstead, who went on to head the Arizona Department of Public Safety, was displeased with the decision, and he signed an affidavit saying it was done for political reasons. A Maricopa County Superior Court judge reinstated the commutation, and Hamm was awarded $70,000 in damages. He was finally released from prison in 1992.
By that time, Hamm was imprisoned in Tucson and Donna had moved to Phoenix. On the day he was released, she hired a limousine and told the driver to go as slow as he could to make the ride to Phoenix last as long as possible.
Soon, there were flashing police car lights in the rear-view mirror: They were pulled over for going under the speed limit.
Donna tried to bring Hamm too quickly back to life outside of prison, and he struggled. She took him to Scottsdale Fashion Square to buy clothes. The choices were overwhelming. And so was trying to eat in the food court with people bumping into the back of Hamm’s chair, setting off his internal prison alarms. They went on a honeymoon to Sedona, and that, too, was overwhelming: All that open space! Hamm asked to go back to the hotel, and he wept.
Freedom’s overwhelming reality
While he was still in prison, Hamm had graduated summa cum laude from NAU, earning a degree in sociology. And he scored high enough on the LSAT, the law school entrance exam, to be admitted into the ASU College of Law. He disclosed his criminal history to the school.
Cue the uproar: It became a subject for the television news show “60 Minutes.”
Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods was concerned.
“Can a man who plans an execution, who carries out that execution in a cold-blooded fashion, who knows what he’s doing — can that sort of person, 20 years later, turn their life around?” he asked reporter Mike Wallace. “Now, I think they can turn it around — but I also think we have a right to be skeptical.”
He continued, “If there’s a murderer practicing law there, I think that’s a mistake. Within the legal profession, we ought to be able to have some standards, I would think. And one standard — this is kind of a crazy notion, a wild idea — that maybe one standard we would have in the legal profession is that if you commit a cold-blooded murder, you’re not going to be admitted to practice law. I think we might aspire to that.”
After Hamm graduated from law school, there was further uproar when he was asked to teach two classes in the College of Criminal Justice. An adjunct instructor resigned in protest. The college’s phone lines were clogged with angry opinions. The university decided to switch Hamm’s contract to a research position because the hiring had offended peoples’ values.
Hamm passed the state Bar exam in 1999, but waited until his parole had been discharged before he applied to the Bar.
The Bar’s Committee on Character and Fitness denied him entry, and so he appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court.
“What I mostly remember about Hamm’s case, was if you have a first-degree murder case, it’s a black mark, and you have to show that you have made a rehabilitation,” said Andrew Hurwitz. Now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Hurwitz in 2005 was an Arizona Supreme Court justice.
Though he is sympathetic in retrospect, Hurwitz felt that Hamm had erred in representing himself.
The court ruled unanimously to deny the appeal, claiming Hamm lacked “candor” about several things: Had he accepted full responsibility for the crime? Did he admit that he had also shot Staples? He had not paid child support during the years he was in prison, even though he tried to make that up when he got out. And perhaps the opening paragraphs of Hamm’s petition to the court borrowed too closely from case law.
Right after the hearing, then-Bar President Helen Perry Grimwood told the media that there should be a rule barring killers.
“Premeditated first-degree murderers should not be licensed to practice law,” she said.
But the attorney Ulises Ferragut told me then, “I think the man borders on genius. I think James Hamm is the poster child for rehabilitation, and if we can’t see fit to admit him to practice law based on his years of rehabilitation and service to the community, then is there really a system by which someone can be rehabilitated?”
“I still stand by those words,” he told me recently.
Hamm appealed further to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take up the case.
He and Donna went home, wrote down the names of everyone involved in his Bar application — the judges, the lawyers — and threw the papers into a bonfire in their back yard. They held hands as the fire burned.
“It was a way of us letting go and not holding anything,” Donna said. “We were done.”
A different kind of legal career
Hamm spent the next 20 years as a paralegal, working with Donna at Middle Ground and hiring out to attorneys.
“Donna and James were the experts on anything related to the Department of Corrections,” said the attorney Lori Voepl. “They always had an insight.”
Current and former directors of the Department of Corrections declined interviews, but former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio speaks respectfully of their work.
“They would go after me over and over on the jail issues, how I treated the prisoners, etc.,” he said. “We went after each other, but it wasn’t nasty. I think I congratulated him when he graduated law school. In those days, it wasn’t as bitter as it is today.”
After the years of scandal, Hamm was content to stay out of the spotlight.
“Donna was a presence in the legislature, and I was in the background,” he said. “I wasn’t wanting to be front and center. I just wanted to be able to support that. And the same with the attorneys I worked for. I loved the research, I loved the support, I loved analyzing the situation and providing information to the attorneys. But I wasn’t interested in being front and center. That’s just not my thing.”
Hamm first started working with Ferragut in 2000, when the attorney was representing a 14-year-old boy who had held his Glendale middle-school class at gunpoint. The Hamms volunteered their time.
“I was trying to see if there was any way to keep him in juvenile court,” Ferragut remembers, “and (prosecutors) wanted to try him as an adult.”
The effort failed. The boy was charged as an adult, but after media exposure, Ferragut was able to get a favorable plea deal.
“James, at the top of his game, was absolutely brilliant,” Ferragut said.
He was particularly effective in cases where they were appealing the sentence of someone already in prison, Ferragut said, or someone who was on the way to prison.
“He would sit down, put the person at ease and say, ‘Here’s what you’ve got to do.’”
Michael Denea, another attorney Hamm worked with, is equally as effusive in his praise, citing meticulous documentation and a steady work ethic.
“James knew how to talk the talk with inmates,” he said.
Most important, James continued to volunteer his time to Middle Ground, sifting through all of the prison-related bills in the Arizona Legislature to see which ones the organization should get behind.
He quit late last year.
When brilliance fades
Dementia creeps in slowly.
“It starts off very subtle,” Donna said, “and you try to make excuses that it’s something else.”
A couple of car accidents. Forgetting the names of the grandkids. Not being able to work multiple computer screens at the same time.
The Hamms have downsized from a house in Tempe to a condo in the East Valley. Donna will let the lease on Middle Ground’s Tempe office lapse so she can work from home and be there for James.
During the time we spent doing interviews, the phone rang regularly, and Donna took calls from prisoners trying to navigate their grievances with the Corrections Department.
Her husband was upbeat and animated, engaged in conversation, relaying memories of 50 years that had passed since he was a hippie called Country. He stumbled over some details and repeated others without realizing it. But he’s still the James Hamm I first met 20 years ago at his Supreme Court hearing.
“He’s quieter, less engaged,” Donna says. “He doesn’t offer his opinion as much.”
But he knows who he is and what he has done, for better or worse. And he refuses to feel sorry for himself.
“You don’t whine about things when you’ve committed murder and you served your time,” he told me, his voice rising to a crescendo.
“I have not been treated unfairly.
“I spent a long time in prison. I had it coming. I listened to people there bitch and complain and whine and grumble about how badly they were treated and how unfair life is, and I didn’t argue with them. It wasn’t my job to go and change their mind.
“My attitude was that I was there legitimately, and if I could do something with my life while I was there, then I was going to do it. And if I had spent the rest of my life in prison, that’s not unfair. I can still have a life there and still help people while I’m there. I can still do good.
“There’s nothing to complain about.”
[END]
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