PALMER — It’s a Tuesday and court is in session.

Some of the hearings on the calendar might belong to John Richard. But that morning, at his office, he greets a visitor in a floral print shirt, jeans and boots.

Not exactly lawyer attire.

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But should the need to appear in court arise, that attire is close at hand. Next to a rumpled couch he has a rack of suit coats, beside his desk, a rack of ties. They’re all Jerry Garcia ties, from a popular line that draws on the fabled Grateful Dead guitarist’s artwork. Richard’s been picking them up here and there for years, over multiple jobs and at least one attempted retirement.

“When I retired I got rid of suits and coats and ties but I couldn’t bring myself to take the Jerry Garcia ties to the Salvation Army, although that’s where many of them came from,” he said.

Richard came to Palmer to head up the local branch of the Public Defender Agency in February of 2007. Before that he’d been in Kenai, heading up that branch. He’s been the head municipal prosecutor in Anchorage and worked for the district attorney’s office in Fairbanks. And he worked for a while in the Lower 48.

Working on both sides of the bar — as a prosecutor and as a defender — has been a good career path, Richard said.

“I’ve managed to stay away from suing people and handling divorces.”

And, he said, he doesn’t particularly prefer one side to the other.

“It’s easier to get things done as a prosecutor,” Richard said. But, when he worked on that side, “I missed contact with the defendants. (As a prosecutor) you don’t get a chance to really find out what’s going on.”

Both sides, he said, are a form of law enforcement. Prosecutors are making sure the law is applied and that guilty parties pay their debt. But defense attorneys are making sure the law is applied fairly — that the right evidence is used at trial and that a defendant’s sentence is appropriate.

He said there’s a misconception that defense attorneys are just trying to get criminals off the hook.

“That’s just not the nature of our work,” he said. “If defense lawyers won every case, something would be wrong with our system.”

The police would be arresting the wrong people or prosecutors would be charging the wrong crimes, he said.

He said all this with a distinct southern accent. Richard is from Russellville, Ky., in Logan County.

“Where the James gang robbed their first bank and Andrew Jackson fought his last duel,” as he puts it.

He doesn’t get back there much. But there are pictures of the area all over his office. Except behind his couch. On that wall hangs an enormous American flag with 13 stars.

“It’s been in my family for about, I guess, 140 years or so,” he said.

It’s a centennial flag, created to celebrate the country’s 100th birthday. He said it had been traveling with him for years, packed away and stored. He said he always figured one day he’d get a nice house with a big den and he’d frame it.

But then one day he realized, “I’m just as likely to come and go without this thing ever being behind archival glass.”

When he’s not working, Richard has done a lot of different things. In the ‘80s, while working as an attorney, he spent a good portion of his off time as a guide on Denali during the climbing season. It was that job that landed him on Kilimanjaro, when his company was running a “Seven Summits” tour.

That time he tried to retire, he spent most of his days building electric guitars. It started out as a plan to learn how to play — given enough time a person could master just about anything, Richard said. But he found he spent more time building the things than playing them.

These days, back on the job, it’s a simple matter to tell when Richard is at the courthouse. Just look for his car — a white Volkswagen Rabbit with blotches of blue and red paint up and down the sides. Not long ago it sat in that lot with a large canoe strapped to its roof.

“The car has become kind of a source of notoriety,” Richard said. “I’ve put 100,000 miles on it.”

The paint job, he said, started as a rust abatement project. He’d noticed some rust spots and ground them out. Then, he figured, he’d cover the spots with Rust-Oleum. But then he got the idea to stencil on some stars. He said he has no illusions about the quality of his craftsmanship. It wasn’t a very good stencil job.

But the car has got him where needs to go — even in the winter — and it’s the kind he prefers. He’s always been a Volkswagen guy. It’s not his first Rabbit. He’s had Beetles and Vanagons and even a Carmengia.

“The last new car I had was a ‘69 Ford Torino,” he said. “That car just about got me in a lot of trouble.”

But it’s not the trouble that pushed him into the used car lots. He said he’d buy a fancy new car again if he had the means and the desire. But, he said, he’d rather spend his money contributing to the local mechanics rather than to GMAC.

“It’s been quite some time since I thought it made sense to spend money on a car payment,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.