Biography
He was the subject of the 1989 movie True Believer about a Chinatown (San Francisco) murder case in which he won an acquittal for Chol Soo Lee, the defendant. He also successfully defended Black Panther leader Huey Newton in a murder trial and represented individuals from groups as diverse and politically charged as the White Panthers, Hells Angels, Earth First!, and New World Liberation Front (NWLF). Some of these individuals include Brownie Mary, Dennis Peron, Hooty Croy, Ellie Nesler, and Symbionese Liberation Army members Sara Jane Olson, Russell Little and Michael Bortin. Serra, in 2004, won an acquittal during a retrial on murder charges for co-defendant Rick Tabish in the death of casino mogul Ted Binion.
Serra won the Trial Lawyer of the Year award in 2003 (by the organization Trial Lawyers for Public Justice), for his successful litigation of Judi Bari against the FBI.
Serra has taken a vow of poverty and is known for living a frugal lifestyle and driving a run-down car. All income from his cases is distributed to other lawyers except for a very small portion that he uses to pay rent and gas. All of his clothes (including suits, briefcases, shoes etc.) are bought secondhand.
Serra has been in trouble with the law several times for failure to pay income taxes. He refused to pay taxes in protest of the War in Iraq, based on his conviction that the Bush administration was leading the country in the wrong direction and that he would therefore not contribute any money to fund what he saw as Bush's corrupt politics. On July 29, 2005, he was sentenced to 10 months in federal prison, to be served at Lompoc, and ordered to pay $100,000 in restitution for a misdemeanor conviction of willful failure to pay taxes. Serra was released from the federal camp in Lompoc, California, in mid-February 2007, reporting immediately to a San Francisco halfway house. He was released from federal custody, and the halfway house, on March 13, 2007, after serving out his sentence . Along with three other attorneys, Serra filed a class-action lawsuit seeking minimum wages for himself and other inmates, citing slave wages as unconstitutional.
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