Susan B. Jordan, activist lawyer who represented SLA member, killed in plane crash in Utah

Activist lawyer Susan Jordan killed in plane crash

LOS ANGELES — Susan B. Jordan, an activist lawyer who represented high-profile clients such as Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson, has been killed in a plane crash in southern Utah, authorities said.

Jordan, 67, of Ukiah, Calif., was the passenger in a two-seater plane that crashed Friday after clipping a power line, said Garfield County sheriff’s spokeswoman Becki Bronson. The pilot, John Austin, 64, of Boulder, Utah, was also killed.

Sheriff’s officials said the pilot may have been flying too low near State Highway 12 halfway between Escalante and Boulder, Utah.

Jordan, who practiced in the San Francisco area for many years, came to prominence in the 1970s when she represented clients on the fringes of the Patty Hearst trial. She also gained fame for a landmark case of rape victim Inez Garcia who was convicted of killing one of her attackers. In a 1977 retrial, Jordan won Garcia’s acquittal on grounds that she acted in self defense.

“She believed in social change through law and the Inez Garcia case changed the law,” said attorney Stuart Hanlon who practiced with her in the Bay Area. When she began, he said, Jordan drew attention because “she was this amazing attorney who was a woman and there were not that many around.”

In the early 1970s she was drawn into the periphery of the Patty Hearst case, representing two women who had been subpoenaed to testify in Hearst’s bank robbery trial.

“It was such a different time,” Jordan said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press. “The smell of tear gas was ordinary. The sight of police in riot gear was not unusual. … It was an era when people did not assume the legitimacy of institutions. Everything was suspect.”

It was then that she came in contact with the Symbionese Liberation Army, and 25 years later she would be hired by Olson, who was tracked down and charged with conspiring to kill police officers.

Jordan ultimately bowed out of the case, telling the judge that she was fighting an ailment known as trigeminal neuralgia that would not permit her to participate in a long, arduous trial. Jordan said her illness, the result of surgery long ago, caused her extreme pain in her face.

Olson ultimately pleaded guilty and served seven years in prison. She was recently paroled to her adopted home state of Minnesota.

Jordan recently represented the Ukiah Cannabis Buyers Club and had opened an office in that city to handle their cases, Hanlon said.

Jordan became committed to the civil rights movement at a young age, volunteering to register voters in Mississippi in the 1960s. She was born Susan Merle Brokan in Chicago in 1941 and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1963. She worked briefly as a copy writer for Glamour magazine in New York City, going on to earn her master’s at Yeshiva University and then a law degree at Northwestern University in 1970.

Jordan is survived by her husband, Ronald C. Wong; daughter Jennifer Jordan Wong, sister Lois Morris of New York and brother Eugene Borkan of Portland, Ore. Funeral arrangements were pending.