San Diego Criminal Justice Memorial
Honorees
A memorial directory honoring deceased judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys who advanced criminal justice in San Diego County.
John F. O’Laughlin
1920-1968
John O’Laughlin was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Science degree, and received his LLB in 1950 from Harvard University School of Law. He came to San Diego and joined the District Attorney’s Office in 1952, serving until 1956. In addition, he assisted in founding the City of Imperial Beach and served at its first City Attorney until his death.
John was a particularly high-profile prosecutor and defense attorney in the 1950s and 1960s when the San Diego legal community was relatively small – the number of lawyers was less than a thousand. While he was a Deputy D.A., a case which garnered particular notoriety was his prosecution of the head of the butcher’s union and others for a charge of conspiracy to assault a union official when the labor leaders took “the law into their own hands.” (LA Times, 8/9 & 8/10/56).
After leaving the District Attorney’s Office he entered private practice with Bart Sheela, who was also a former prosecutor. A defense case which received national and international attention was John’s successful defense of the owners of the Nexus bookstore in La Jolla. The owners were charged with selling copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which the prosecution claimed was obscene. Rather than relying on a technical defense, John boldly chose to convince the jury the book was not obscene and had literary merit, which effort was successful. The trial judge was Edward Schwartz, who at the time served on the Municipal Court but was later appointed to the federal District Court (the current courthouse is named after him). Judge Schwartz said it was one of the most interesting cases over which he’d presided.
O’Laughlin, along with Bart Sheela and John Sorbo, succeeded in obtaining a hung jury and a subsequent acquittal for the two female defendants in the Ruth Latham kidnaping. Latham claimed to have been kidnaped from her Ocean Beach home, carried in the trunk of a car to Imperial County where she was robbed, stripped, bound, and buried under rocks. Latham escaped her shallow desert grave and stumbled to the highway. The defense maintained that Latham concocted the fantastic story to punish the defendants for a business relationship turned sour, and that they too had been victims of a similar kidnaping that same day (LA Times 9/18/1956, 10/2/56, 12/15/56, 12/21/56, 1/19/57, 3/25/57, 6/8/57).
The effective cross-examination of George Latham – which exposed his prior conviction for fatally shooting a farm laborer on a freight train and disposing of his body in a remote location in North Dakota — was critical to the successful outcome.
John was highly regarded by his peers, not only when he was in the District Attorney’s Office but also when he joined the defense bar. He was particularly well known for his innovative trial themes and effective closing arguments. Other lawyers frequently sought him out for his input on cases they were trying.
He died at a young age from a heart attack and is survived by his wife, Josefina, and daughter, Pamela. John gave generously of his time to professional endeavors, including serving as a member of the State Bar Committee on Law and Procedure.