Donald E. McInnis is a California criminal defense attorney and the author of three books as well as multiple law review articles. He wrote the true-crime book The Stephanie Crowe Murder Case: A Defense Attorney’s Inside Story to reveal the truth behind the botched investigation of the sensational murder of a twelve-year-old girl. In the fiction realm, he has written two novels in the ongoing A. J. Hawke series of legal thrillers: The Sphynx Murder Case and its sequel, Return of the Sphynx. The third book in the series is forthcoming.
Early in his career, McInnis served as a research attorney for the California Superior Courts. Later, he served as a Deputy District Attorney for two northern California counties and a Deputy Public Defender for a southern California county. During his four-decades-long legal career, Mr. McInnis experienced both the prosecution and defense sides of the law and is thoroughly familiar with all aspects of police and prosecution practices.
Mr. McInnis has also served as a Superior Court Judge Pro Tem, has been an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association and a referee/arbitrator for the California Superior Courts.
For the past twenty years, Donald McInnis has specialized as a litigator trying criminal and civil cases. His civil trial work has been in business law, personal injury, wrongful death, medical malpractice, and civil rights cases. Mr. McInnis has handled over a hundred jury trials and negotiated hundreds of settlements. He is admitted to try cases before all state and federal courts in California.
In one of his most high-profile cases, Mr. McInnis represented a defendant in the Stephanie Crowe murder case. When 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe was found stabbed to death on her bedroom floor on Jan. 21, 1998, the Crowe family’s nightmare had only just begun. In the weeks to follow, her brother, Michael, then 14, and two of his friends, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser, were charged with her brutal murder.
To be tried as adults, these three juveniles faced charges that carried life-long prison sentences. Besides Mr. McInnis, also charged with defending the boys were criminal-defense attorneys Mary Ellen Attridge and Paul Blake. These three attorneys faced the daunting task of freeing these boys, two of whom had confessed to the murder.
In a last-minute series of events, the defense discoverd new evidence, and with it a twisting series of bizarre events unfolded which forever shattered the lives of fifteen people and the childhood of the three young boys.
Mr. McInnis lives in San Diego, California, and presses for reforms within the criminal justice system to institute a Children's Bill of Rights and a Miranda warning specifically worded for defendants under the age of 18.
