Profile: Laguna Beach attorney never backs down

Annee Della Donna helps people who cannot help themselves.

Like Juan Rayford and Dupree Glass, two young Black men who spent nearly 17 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit. They were declared innocent in April.

Or the Cooper family, who is distraught after a San Diego cemetery lost the remains of their patriarch, Sidney Cooper Sr.

Della Donna is a defense attorney who can’t let things go. Once something gets to her — an obvious wrong, a preventable tragedy, a privileged bully — she fights back, relentlessly.

“I’ve never seen anything in my 30 years as a lawyer as to what Annee Della Donna did,” said Eric Dubin, referring to the Rayford and Glass case. “Two innocent men would still be in prison and would have been for the rest of their lives, except for Annee Della Donna.”

She worked that case for 10 years, pro bono. Along the way, she founded Innocence Rights of Orange County, taught at University of California, Irvine School of Law and enlisted the help of law students.

“She got those two kids out of prison because she knew they were innocent,” Dubin said. “It was inspiring to watch, it was surreal, it was right out of a movie. Annee Della Donna is the real deal.”

For her part, Della Donna would never take the credit. It’s always about her clients. Even during dire circumstances, any success starts with them.

“We’re so blessed that we get to represent people who have lost loved ones, who have been severely injured,” she said. “Our clients are sitting next to us or their family members. They’re holding our hands; they’re praying with us. That is very real. It’s not about us. It’s about our clients. We’re the lucky ones who get to be their voice.”

Juan Rayford, second from right, and Dupree Glass, far left, sit with their attorneys Eric Dubin, second from left, and Annee Della Donna, right, during a hearing on their case at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on April 20 in Los Angeles. They served 17 years in prison before being released in 2020 after a judge ruled they were wrongfully convicted.

(Marcio Jose Sanchez / Associated Press)

Sitting in her Laguna Beach home office, Della Donna points out pictures and stories of her past clients that surround the room, reminders of success but also as motivation to keep going.

Investigating and defending these cases is hard, emotional work that never seems to stop.

“The stress is hard,” she said, adding that even during off hours — a dinner party or a short vacation — work is always present. “Every time I was having fun and they were in prison, I felt bad.”

Della Donna can recite case after case that weighed on her, either because of the tragedy itself or the frustrating injustice of it.

“A young couple came to me, and they had lost their first baby,” she said. “The baby was born completely healthy. Three days later, he died of necrosis. I found out that the OB/GYN, who was 72, had forgotten to do a very simple test.”

It was a group B strep test, and at the time, doctors needed to order it. Della Donna won the family a settlement. The doctor retired. But Della Donna is most proud of the aftermath. Instead of relying on doctors to order the test, every hospital in California now performs the test routinely, she said.

She and Dubin often work together on the challenging cases, and they’ve learned to be selective. They have to balance the hardship in order to stay sane.

“Our focus is picking cases that speak to us; there’s real victims,” Dubin said. “We take very few cases because the cases we take we go all in on. We cry almost daily with our clients. They become family.”

Della Donna said she’s always been a fighter. When she was 5 years old, she was at a park in Whittier with her mother, and a man grabbed her mom’s purse.

“I ran after him,” she said. “At 5.”

And not just a few yards but a long way. Around a corner. Over a bridge. The man finally emptied the purse and threw it into a riverbed.

Of course Della Donna scampered into the riverbed and retrieved it.

“I have this weird lack of fear,” she said. “I have been this way my whole life, like I can do anything, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.”

In May, the family of Edward Bronstein received $24 million from the state of California — the largest civil rights settlement in state history and the second-largest in the nation — after CHP officers pinned him to the ground, caused him to stopped breathing and die.

Christopher Eisinger died in a similar way with Anaheim police officers in 2018. The family received $2.3 million.

While not all of the cases end in wins, Della Donna always believes in their merits. At their core, there is some injustice, which she boils down to some simple principle. Throughout her office, she likes to tape little quotes to remind her of what’s important.

The one that’s front and center on her computer: “Help people.”

At the end of the Rayford and Glass case, which included the remarkable confession of the real shooter, everyone in the court was struck by the gravity of the outcome.

“That was such a powerful ending,” Della Donna said. “The bailiff came over and hugged us. The court reporter was sobbing and hugging us. The enormity of what we did … and having the real shooter show up in prison garb, handcuffed and confessing for the first time that he was the real shooter.

“That was one of the most amazing days, ever, in my lifetime as a trial lawyer.”

DAVID HANSEN is editor of Under Laguna in Laguna Beach. He can be reached at [email protected].