L. Patrick Gray - Legal Struggles

Legal Struggles

For the next eight years, Gray defended his actions as acting FBI director, testifying before five federal grand juries and four committees of Congress.

On October 7, 1975, the Watergate Special Prosecutor informed Gray that the last Watergate-related investigation of him had been formally closed. Gray was never indicted in relation to Watergate but the scandal dogged him afterwards.

In 1978, Gray was indicted along with Mark Felt and Assistant Director Edward Miller for allegedly having approved illegal break-ins during the Nixon administration. Gray vehemently denied the charges and they were dropped in 1980. Felt and Miller, who had approved the illegal break-ins during the tenures of four separate FBI directors, including J. Edgar Hoover, Gray, William Ruckelshaus, and Clarence Kelley, were convicted and later pardoned by President Ronald Reagan. Exonerated by the Department of Justice after a two-year investigation, Gray returned to his law practice in Connecticut.

Read more about this topic:  L. Patrick Gray

Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or struggles:

    If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.
    Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)

    ...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.
    Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)