BRUNSWICK, Ga. — A outstanding Georgia protection legal professional who typically supplied skilled authorized evaluation for information organizations masking high-profile instances drowned over the weekend whereas swimming in waters close to his coastal residence, a coroner mentioned Tuesday.
Web page Pate, 55, labored for greater than 25 years as a trial lawyer and divided his time between workplaces in Atlanta and Brunswick on the coast.
Pate drowned Sunday whereas swimming in an inlet together with his teenage son on St. Simons Island, the place the household lived, Glynn County Coroner Marc Neu mentioned. Father and son have been swept into open waters by highly effective rip currents, Neu informed The Brunswick Information.
Pate’s son swam again to shore unhurt, however a rescue crew needed to pull Pate from the water. Regardless of makes an attempt to revive him, the coroner mentioned, Pate was pronounced useless at a neighborhood hospital.
“Although he was a formidable, typically intimidating, legal professional within the courtroom, Web page had a straightforward smile, an earnest giggle, and a fantastic humorousness,” Pate’s regulation agency, Pate, Johnson and Church, mentioned in a press release.
Pate was a local of Dublin, Georgia, who graduated from the College of Georgia’s regulation faculty in 1994. He specialised in felony protection, dealing with instances in each state and federal courts, and was a founding member of the Georgia Innocence Mission.
Along with attempting instances, Pate ceaselessly supplied skilled commentary and evaluation on authorized points to media organizations together with The New York Instances, CNN, NPR and The Related Press.
Jason Sheffield, a metro Atlanta trial lawyer and president of the Georgia Affiliation of Felony Protection Attorneys, known as Pate “a larger-than-life particular person and legal professional.”
“Web page’s dedication, creativity, data and compassion for these individuals dealing with prosecution throughout america was legendary,” Sheffield informed The Atlanta Journal-Structure.
State Sen. Jen Jordan, an Atlanta Democrat operating this fall for Georgia legal professional basic, posted on social media Tuesday that she had identified Pate for almost three a long time.
“He was good, sort, skilled — and will cross look at the hell out of a witness,” Jordan tweeted. “Such a loss to his household & everybody who liked him.”
