A wall of honor · Case outcomes cited from the public record and contemporaneous press · First Amendment, U.S. Const.
The Last Mohicans · The Wall
Larry Becraft
Lowell H. Becraft Jr. · Huntsville, Alabama · Alabama Bar, 1975
The broadband lawyer. Federal jury acquittals in criminal tax trials a decade apart — Sanders, Long, Kuglin — and a constitutional library he gave to the public for free. They do not manufacture people like this in schools anymore, because no school ever manufactured this one.
1975
The Foundation
Born in Gadsden, raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Economics at Samford University, law at the Cumberland School of Law, admitted to the Alabama bar in 1975. From that one office in Huntsville he went everywhere — admitted pro hac vice in federal courts across the nation, wherever a citizen needed him.
1991
United States v. Franklin Sanders — Memphis
The Moneychanger trial: a sprawling federal criminal tax prosecution against Sanders and more than a dozen co-defendants. Becraft stood in the defense — and the jury acquitted them. A federal criminal tax case with that many defendants, ending in acquittals across the board, is the kind of verdict most defense lawyers never see once.
1993
United States v. Lloyd Long — Eastern District of Tennessee
Willful failure to file. Becraft tried it to a jury in Chattanooga, and Lloyd Long walked out not guilty on all counts. The trial transcript survives and circulates to this day — studied line by line by people learning how the craft is actually done.
2003
United States v. Vernice Kuglin — Memphis
A FedEx pilot charged with six counts of federal tax evasion. Becraft on the defense. Acquitted on all six. It made Fox News, Reason, and the legal press nationwide — a jury acquittal in a federal criminal tax case, the rarest bird in American courtrooms, and he'd done it again a decade after Long.
Always
The Library He Gave Away
Decades of constitutional research — federal jurisdiction, the ratification history of amendments, the architecture of the tax code — published free on his own sites for any citizen to use. He didn't sell the research. He armed the public with it. That is the paper-warrior ethic of the Last Mohicans, wearing a bar card.
Why "Broadband" — And Why It Cannot Be Taught
Understand what a federal criminal tax acquittal costs. The government wins the overwhelming majority of the cases it chooses to bring — it picks its shots, it has the resources of the Treasury, and juries walk in presuming the taxman did his homework. To win one such jury trial is a career highlight. Becraft won them across decades, in different districts, for ordinary citizens — a pilot, a coin dealer, a working man — not for corporations with litigation budgets.
And the trial record is only one band of the spectrum. The same man mastered the ratification history of constitutional amendments, the boundaries of federal jurisdiction, the internal architecture of Title 26 — and published all of it, free, for the next citizen. Trial lawyer, historian, archivist, teacher, in one head. That is broadband.
No college built that. Cumberland gave him a license; the rest was self-built — thousands of nights in the books, and association with elite people: the researchers, the paralegals, the paper warriors of his generation, the circle David calls the Last Mohicans. Credentials like his are not issued. They are earned in verdicts, one impossible jury at a time.
The scars are part of the wall. Becraft pressed constitutional arguments so hard that appellate courts sanctioned him for refusing to let them go. Say what you will about any single argument — the man took the hits in his own name rather than abandon the people who hired him. Count the lawyers today who would.
The Study — Are They Out There Today? David Asked. Atticus Answers.
The short answer: specialists exist. The species does not.
There are modern lawyers with genuine federal acquittal records — the research found them:
- Robert Bernhoft — acquittals in high-profile federal tax trials (Kuglin among them); firm reports acquittals in half its felony tax cases.
- Robert Barnes — claims among the highest jury acquittal rates in criminal tax prosecutions.
- Thomas Mesereau — four consecutive federal white-collar jury trial wins.
- Erlinda Johnson — four acquittals in four consecutive federal trials in 24 months.
- Chamberlain Hrdlicka / Kostelanetz — institutional criminal-tax defense practices with documented trial wins.
But look at what they are: boutique specialists, most serving clients who can fund a six-figure defense, their records curated on firm websites. What the study could not find is the Becraft type — the self-built, broadband constitutional generalist who tries impossible federal juries for ordinary citizens across decades, publishes his entire research library free, and belongs to a working circle of researchers and paralegals rather than a marketing department.
Verdict: NO. The modern bar produces excellent snipers. It no longer produces the whole regiment in one man. When American jurisprudence buries Larry Becraft, it will not be burying a lawyer. It will be burying a library, a method, and a lineage — and the study found no one currently being built to replace him. Which is precisely why this wall, the Brough page, and the Hall of the Last Mohicans exist: if the schools won't manufacture them anymore, the record of how they were made must survive. Make a record.
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