Farewell to Duncan McMillan, Raleigh’s Atticus Finch, who defended the poor for free

Over his long career as a lawyer, Duncan McMillan stood for the clients who were hard to love, most of them dead-broke and short on friends.

For the high school kid who mixed hydrochloric acid into his teacher’s water bottle: “He did a terribly foolish thing.”

For the middle-age man watching a girls’ Frisbee team through a pair of binoculars: “You can logically infer from the evidence that the defendant is a weirdo.”

For the soccer player who kicked an opponent in the head, angry at being fouled: “It was just one kick.”

Then consider the day McMillan’s client walked into court wearing only his boxer shorts and shackles, having flushed his nice new suit down the jailhouse toilet.

This nearly naked defendant, seeking a reprieve from the death penalty, caused McMillan to sprint down Fayetteville Street into Belk’s department store to buy a pair of gray-flannel slacks and a striped blue shirt — aided by his co-counsel, Joseph Knott III.

“Joe’s color blind and I have poor taste,” he told The N&O in 1995, “but we got some nice stuff.”

This colorful Raleigh attorney with a eternal weakness for the luckless underdog died last week at 72.

He leaves behind a thousand grateful parties — rich and poor, guilty and wrongfully accused — who had someone to speak for them on their worst day.

“He was a very good lawyer,” said Raleigh attorney Wade Smith, no stranger to the same compliment. “He wasn’t a sloppy lawyer at all, and he was a courageous lawyer. He did not shy away from making arguments he felt were the right ones. I admired that very much about him. This may sound phony, but it seemed to me he laid up treasures in heaven.”

‘Duncan did not let me down’

McMillan was long-legged and lanky like Lincoln, but more often described as Raleigh’s Atticus Finch. In a career stretching over five decades, he represented an estimated two-thirds of his clients for free.

One of those posted an anonymous tribute on his obituary page , describing himself as a busboy at Player’s Retreat in the midst of a disastrous freshman year of college.

“Duncan barely knew me, other than as one of the young guys that picked up his empty glasses of Dewar’s,” he wrote. “Nonetheless, he stepped up to defend me. In exchange, all he asked for was a commitment to turn my act around and pay it forward if I had the chance. Duncan did not let me down on his end, and I kept the promise on mine. I am now a lawyer myself.”

McMillan’s distant cousin, Jim Jenkins, now retired from The News & Observer, recalled regular visits to McMillan’s downtown law office to gab and smoke cigarettes. He always found the lobby packed with clients unable to pay a dime.

His office was cluttered with fishing poles and arrowheads, and his diploma from Wake Forest University hung crooked on the wall. More prominently, McMillan displayed a prize bass he had caught on the Lumber River and stuffed himself.

On one of those visits, Jenkins recalled, McMillan met with a Raleigh doctor who brought his son in for help with a traffic ticket.

The doctor braced his teenage child for a blistering lecture, but when McMillan heard the story of him popping wheelies on a playground at night, he gushed, “Man, that sounds like fun.”

“He was a very human man,” said Joseph Cheshire V, longtime Raleigh lawyer. “He understood people who had problems, and he wanted to help. That’s one of the reasons he was so beloved.”

‘Brilliance, bearing and bright humor’

Much of the inspiration for this legal career came from his father’s example. Robert Leroy McMillan also enjoyed a 50-year legal career in Raleigh and died at age 100 in July.

The elder McMillan also made a habit of working for free, and he brought the same measure of joy to his work: playing piano each day before breakfast, hiking the Appalachian Trail in a tie, swimming in the Lumber River at the family homeplace known as Riverton in Scotland County.

His son would grill burgers there, similarly attired in a necktie and suspenders.

“You can say he had the brilliance, bearing and bright humor of a prince, but never cloaked it in pride,” said Tommy Goldsmith, also an N&O alumnus, and also related. “I was lucky to know Duncan Archibald McMillan all my life, as our grandfathers were brothers, knew him from enchanted Riverton, from Pullen church, from first grade at Fred A. Olds, and all through Broughton, where we ran against each other for junior class president. I was never more happy than when he won.”

He defended killers because they needed defending. He brought up their dark childhoods not as an excuse, but as a means to understanding their cruelty and how it is so often learned behavior.

Younger lawyers would watch him make arguments to the jury, hoping to imitate his craft. He didn’t thunder and pound his fist. There was little bluster to his delivery. He won cases because he spoke calmly and rationally, looking each juror in the eye and reminding them that every life is worth saving, and every soul holds some good.

Sign Up for RDU on the Rise