In this 1996 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Gerry Spence — the fringe-jacketed Wyoming trial lawyer who never lost a criminal case before a jury — sits down alongside actor Leslie Nielsen for one of his most revealing television interviews. It is built around his memoir The Making of a Country Lawyer, and it goes straight to the decision that redirected his career.
Long before he defended Karen Silkwood’s family, Randy Weaver after Ruby Ridge, and Imelda Marcos, Spence was a young insurance lawyer who was very good at winning. Then came the Apple Annie case, which he could never forget. He won it. That was the problem. What happened the next night, in a grocery store checkout line, turned him against the work that had made him rich — and sent forty letters to forty insurance companies out the following morning. He tells the whole thing here in his own unhurried voice, and follows it with why, in his experience, the best cases never pay.
From there he talks about justice and judges, and an American Bar Association story that lands as a joke and functions as an indictment. Nielsen, then playing Clarence Darrow on stage, tells Spence he is the finer actor of the two — and Spence proceeds to sing, then explains how he chased Imogene, and recites the Imogene Crow poem.
Gerry Spence died in August 2025 at 96. Unseen since it first aired on CTV, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.
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