At trial, he was represented by a public defender who wholly failed to investigate the case, did not know Larry faced the death penalty until a week before trial, and then presented no defense. This, although a solid one was available.

    After Larry was convicted in a day-and-a-half trial and sentenced to death by the judge when the jury could not decide on a penalty, the PD failed to initiate any appeal and had not applied for a stay of execution by the time I met Larry at precisely* the essential moment and immediately got involved.

    A stay of execution was granted; and, after I hired the recently retired polygraph expert from the Indiana State Police Department and later the nation's top polygraphist at the Keeler Institute in Chicago to run tests on Larry, both concluded that Larry was telling the truth when he claimed he was not involved in the double homicide.

    With that information in hand, I was awarded a grant from the Playboy Foundation to help defray expenses after Playboy magazine's senior editor, Bill Helmer, had a private detective conduct a preliminary investigation into the case as well as Larry himself. Then, a few months after the trial judge was persuaded at a hearing to grant a new trial, Helmer published an article about the matter titled “The Man Who 'Didn't Do It'” in the August 1980, issue of Playboy.

    At Larry Hicks' new trial, in my opening statement I reminded jurors of the judge's earlier instructions that the burden of proof was on the state to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and that the defendant had no burden to prove anything at all and then told them that, in this case, the defense would accept the burden of proof and affirmatively prove that Larry was innocent – which we did, in spades.

    Then, after Larry was found not guilty and the jurors were still in the courtroom about to leave that night, I invited them and the judge to celebrate the acquittal at the Holiday Inn, and 11 of the 12 jurors and the judge (the same one who had once sentenced Hicks to death) celebrated with Larry and the defense team, with the last people leaving after the sun came up the next day. A Chicago newspaper promptly blared the front-page headline "A lawyer snatches man from Death Row" and an Indianapolis newspaper wrote, "Forgotten man is rescued from death row." Bill Helmer's second article, published in the May 1981, issue of Playboy was “The Ordeal of Larry Hicks.”

    Special note: Larry Hicks was a deeply religious man who prayed for God to help him and got others to pray for him as well. We met* by mere coincidence (some people will think, but consider the previous sentence and below) a mere eight days before he was set to be executed. He was sure that God sent me to save his life so had no worries about the outcome of the upcoming new trial and told this to a psychiatrist, who told Larry that he probably should not mention it to the judge at an upcoming pretrial competency hearing or the judge might think he was crazy.

    * I was leaving the state prison (170 miles northwest of my office in Indianapolis) after having met with a few clients and prospective clients and was passing through a small secure room approaching a door of bars. (This was called Gate 3, as there were two more to go through to get out of the prison.) Larry was passing through the same secure room. Handcuffed in front with a chain connecting the cuffs to leg-irons, he was being escorted to a different door than I was heading to. I was approaching a sliding door of bars through which I would go to the front of the prison, proceed out into the parking lot, and head back to Indianapolis in my new Jaguar XJ-6. Larry Hicks, on the other hand, was heading toward an iron door opening to a hallway that would eventually take him to a special cellblock where men waited for an opportunity to sit in the Indiana electric chair.

I was near the sliding gate when, from slightly behind me and to my left, I heard a man say, “Sir... Sir.” I turned and listened for a couple of minutes while the guard escorting Larry patiently waited. - Larry had been in a visiting room meeting with a Chicago-based journalist who had interviewed him to get his thoughts about being the next person in America scheduled to be executed after John Spenkelink would be the following day in Florida.

Had I left the attorney-client visitation room as little as 30 seconds earlier than I did, or had Larry come out of his interview as little as 30 seconds later than he did, we never would have met. Or, if the guard had said something to Larry like, “Let's keep moving, young man; if you want to talk to Mr. Stanton, write him a letter and make an appointment,” the train on the fast track to death would have kept chugging along.