Idealist hippie lawyer can't beat the taxman

For any other lawyer, a jail term would mean financial ruin. For Tony Serra the 10-month sentence he starts this weekend for 20 years of tax evasion will be little more than a much-needed rest.

With his long silver hair in a ponytail, his tie-dyed shirts and his admission that he smokes cannabis every day, Serra, 72, isn't like most lawyers, yet in a 40-year career he has built an unrivalled reputation of being able to win cases others dismiss as unwinnable.

What makes him remarkable is that, in a country where lawyers are among society's top earners, he has no credit cards, savings or bank account and owns no property. All his clothes are from charity shops or the Salvation Army. His net worth is whatever he happens to have in his pockets.

'I was born without a desire for material things,' he says in his downtown San Francisco office, where incense burns and ethnic prints and hand-painted murals adorn the walls. 'I am a child of the Sixties and that ideology - anti-materialism, brotherhood, non-racism - these are the things I still believe in.'

Occasionally Serra accepts payment for his services and uses the money to pay staff and bills, but for the most part he works for free. His client list has included Hell's Angels, environmental activists, Black Panther radicals and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst.

This is his third tax conviction. He did not pay in 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam war and served four months in prison. He forgot to pay in 1979 and got probation. His defence this time, apart from that he is 'financially dysfunctional', is that, having never profited from law, he could not possibly be liable for tax.

Serra was so poor that his five children - Shelter, Ivory, Chime, Wonder, and Lilac Bright - were put through college by his older brother, the hugely successful sculptor Richard Serra. The Internal Revenue Service saw things differently, announced that Tony Serra owed $500,000 in back taxes and demanded he be jailed. Many of California's leading lawyers attended court to testify that Serra had been their chief inspiration in taking up law. Having pleaded guilty, jail was inevitable. Serra must also pay back $100,000 at the rate of $1,500 per month.

Jury trials are the exception rather than the rule in the US. The process is expensive and the proceedings so drawn out that most defendants try to strike some kind of plea bargain. 'Most lawyers here don't like trials,' said Serra. 'But I love them. A lot of times I get attached to cases to add leverage. It shows they are serious about going to trial.'

He took on the case of an American Indian facing the death penalty for shooting a police officer in what he claimed was self-defence. Serra got him acquitted. 'In all, I've won four death penalty cases. Most of the time when lawyers talk about winning a death penalty case, they mean they managed to get the sentence reduced to life without parole. When I say I won, I mean the defendants were acquitted and walked out of court.'

In the words of one admirer, Serra 'uses his voice like a musical instrument'. He has juries hanging on his every word. His animated closing arguments often last several hours and regularly include poetry and even song.

'When I graduated I wanted to be a poet. I went around Europe on a scooter then ended up in Morocco with the expat crowd. I fell in love with a heroin addict. It was beautiful, amazing, but very self-destructive. I said to myself, "What are you doing? You're not a heroin addict. Do something else with yourself." '

He began as a prosecutor but was soon disillusioned. 'I didn't want to spend 40 years putting people in cages. I decided I'd work at setting them free instead.'

Serra's other great passion is marijuana. Much of his inspiration comes from what he calls 'cannabis consultations', and he defends as many drug dealers as he can, seeing the war on drugs as a war on civil rights. 'It hasn't stopped me from functioning as a lawyer, so I find it hard to subscribe to the view that it is harmful.'

Having smoked the drug illegally for years, Serra was recently certified to use medical marijuana to ease the pain of two hip replacements. Whether he will be allowed to continue using in prison is something his own lawyer is working on.