Dan Barton Dives Deep
When Dan Barton arrived in California to study at Stanford Law School, he was drawn to the Bay Area’s progressive political culture. It was the late 1980s and Dan had already been involved in challenging U.S. military policy in Central America as a scholar of Latin American Studies at Brown University. Now in law school, he knew that his drive to question authority and stand with the vulnerable would best be suited to a career in criminal defense practice. Meeting Tom Nolan gave him the chance to fulfill that aspiration.
After taking a year to research Spanish constitutional law as a Fulbright Scholar in Barcelona, Spain, Dan returned to Stanford for his third and final year of study. As it happened, Tom, a founding partner of the firm that would become Nolan Barton Olmos & Luciano, was teaching his first course in Advanced Criminal Practice at Stanford Law School that same year. As Tom’s student, Dan had the opportunity to observe Tom defend a member of the Billionaire Boys Club in a homicide trial in Redwood City. Dan was inspired. He had found his mentor.
After graduating and taking the bar exam, Dan took a summer job helping Tom work up a defense in a complex white-collar case. Afterwards, Dan departed for Spain once more to await his bar results. Soon, however, he got a call inviting him to return to Tom’s criminal defense practice. It had become clear that Dan’s skills would be a welcome addition to the Palo Alto office then managed by Tom and his partner Andy Parnes.
In his thirty-plus years with the firm, Dan has risen from summer intern to managing partner of Nolan Barton Olmos & Luciano. Wholly dedicated to criminal defense, he has continuously pursued the highest degree of literacy in the law, the science, and the facts of every case. As a result, he has been involved in many of Northern California’s most compelling criminal cases.
Dan first caught his stride representing political activists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, reproductive rights were an especially volatile flashpoint. Operation Rescue, a national anti-abortion organization, had reached peak membership and was staging massive sit-in style blockades of women’s health clinics in Northern California. The organization’s protests drew counter-demonstrations from activists who formed the Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights (BACORR). When Operation Rescue would descend on a clinic, BACORR would organize to protect the clinic and keep it open for business, creating corridors for staff and patients trying to enter. The competing protests were chaotic and contentious, often resulting in arrests of BACORR clinic defenders.
Dan became involved in the BACORR movement first as a legal observer and later as trial counsel for BACORR members arrested during the actions. In one case, Dan represented a recent law school graduate who had been arrested following an altercation with Joseph Farah, then editor-in-chief of the Sacramento Union newspaper and future founder of WorldNetDaily. During an action at a clinic in Sacramento, Dan’s client verbally confronted an Operation Rescue protestor who had breached protocol by trespassing on clinic property. Farah then approached the client and grabbed her arm. She demanded that he let go of her before fending him off with her fist.
In defending his client, Dan knew that as a local newspaper editor Farah might enjoy a presumption of credibility. To challenge Farah, it was essential to show the jury Farah’s character and history as well as the circumstances of his accosting the client. The jury would have to distrust Farah and agree that the client had adequate reason to fight back. Through his research into Farah’s writings, Dan discovered that Farah had authored derogatory pieces about “lesbian agent provocateurs” in the pro-choice movement. The jury learned that Farah had pseudonymously authored pieces in extremist far-right publications such as the New American, a John Birch Society magazine. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury quickly returned a verdict of not guilty.
In another rapid acquittal for a BACORR member, Dan represented “Johnny Vermont” on similar charges in San Jose. In that case, Dan placed the politics of the protest at center stage. He was careful to never take his eyes off the political context in his approach to the altercation between his client, a clinic defender, and an Operation Rescue member, maintaining a steady and ultimately successful course even when Johnny Vermont’s father, himself a judge, questioned Dan’s strategy. In those and the following years, Dan continued to dedicate a portion of his practice to defending people willing to risk criminal charges to speak out for what they thought was right. Besides BACORR members, some of his other clients included Gulf War protestors, anti-nuclear protestors, Stanford students demonstrating for expanded ethnic studies courses, and surfers using direct action to defend the rights of public access to California beaches. Through his dedication to defending political activists, Dan has taken part in movements aimed at building a better country and remains proud of his commitment to using his abilities as a trial attorney to effect positive change.
In his early years at the firm, Dan served as co-counsel alongside Tom Nolan for several high-stakes trials representing clients accused of armed robbery, murder, and perjury. It was from these experiences working with Tom and Andy Parnes that Dan had the opportunity to absorb two distinct legal styles. From Tom, he learned to always advocate for the humanity of the client, no matter the criminal charges. From Andy, he learned to be studious, methodical, and to temper emotive appeals with insight and intellect.
This dual mentorship led Dan to develop a personal style that values scientific accuracy and is strongly personable. One recent case that benefitted from his scientific approach involved a tragic car accident.
Driving her young daughter to school along a busy Palo Alto road, Dan’s client was unable to stop her car in time when an elderly couple stepped out into the pavement. Both the man and woman were hit, and the man later died from his injuries. The driver was distraught and fully cooperative with the investigation, which concluded she was not under the influence of any drugs or alcohol at the time of the accident. When charges were filed, she was accused of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter.
In the lead up to the trial, Dan studied the science of accident-reconstruction and images of the crash site, delving into the data and the details to determine where exactly the collision occurred. This piece of information would be critical to the case, as Dan’s client had been specifically charged with hitting the couple while they were in a crosswalk. However, because the intersection near the accident site was considered an unmarked crosswalk, there were no stop signs or painted lines. This made determining exactly what had occurred more difficult. Nonetheless, Dan was confident after reviewing the evidence that the accident happened just outside the unmarked crosswalk.
When the prosecution called a police officer to the stand and qualified him as an expert in accident reconstruction, Dan was ready to challenge the numbers. It quickly became evident that Dan knew more about the accident site than the officer. The cross-examination was damaging enough to negate the need to call the defendant or an expert accident reconstruction witness to testify for the defense. At the close of trial, the jury acquitted Dan’s client and voiced their resentment for the poor quality of the police department’s accident investigation.
This same mastering of the scientific evidence has been the basis of Dan’s continuing success defending people accused of driving under the influence. These cases, which may seem routine, are sometimes quite complex, requiring an understanding of the multitude of toxicological factors that influence the determination of a person’s blood alcohol content. Challenging the state’s experts and police officers becomes a key factor in contesting whether the prosecutor can prove that the accused was in fact intoxicated at the time of driving. When a case goes to trial, however, more than just the science is at play—there is the need for a strong, story-driven defense narrative.
Dan’s natural drive to understand the inner workings of the person accused of a crime has allowed him to gracefully take on cases involving gang members and people accused of murder, fraud, and sex crimes. In these types of cases, as with all cases, there is often an elaborate human story that needs to be discovered and told. When Dan received a call from a retired Palo Alto school teacher and lifelong fighter for economic justice asking him to represent her gardener in a major drug case, Dan knew he would need to dig deep into the human story.
The gardener had come to California as a refugee from El Salvador. He was well-known and loved in the local community and was never associated with any criminal activity. He was a hard-working family man who for many Palo Altans personified the desperate Salvadorans who fled an especially violent civil war to raise their families in peace. Nonetheless, investigators had accused him of being involved in a clandestine methamphetamine laboratory operating out of a San Benito ranch.
Dan dived in deep and did not give up. He stuck with his client and took the case to trial after all of the co-defendants had pled out. He delivered a careful examination of the evidence and a compelling presentation of the gardener’s finances, lifestyle, and character. Dan called his client as a witness to explain how he and his wife each worked multiple jobs and rented out a spare bedroom in their home to make ends meet in the expensive mid-peninsula area. The gardener also explained why he went to the ranch and what he did there. Dan called the retired schoolteacher as a character witness to tell the jury how she trusted her gardener to take care of her home when she was away. At trial’s end, the jury concluded that the prosecutor had not proved the gardener had knowledge of any illegal activity taking place at the ranch. They acquitted him of three counts and hung eleven to one to acquit on the fourth. The District Attorney dropped the fourth charge, and the gardener and his family remained honest contributing members of the local community.
Dan has found similar success telling his client’s stories through post-conviction relief cases where the goal is to eliminate the immigration consequences of the client’s prior record. Fluent in Spanish, Dan has frequently taken on these cases on behalf of Mexican and Central American immigrants, many of whom have been in California since they were children. In these cases, the life story of the client is especially critical to demonstrating how they have matured since the time of their offense and how they have become responsible people in their communities. With this narrative-conscious approach, Dan has helped keep numerous families together. It is the opportunity to do exactly this kind of work that has kept him part of the Nolan Barton Olmos & Luciano community for the length of his career. Now the firm’s managing partner, Dan seeks to model an ethic of passionate and client-focused criminal defense for years to come.