Michael Satris, a criminal defense attorney and co-founder of a nonprofit that achieved historic legal victories for prisoners in California, has died at age 70.

Satris spend most of his 44-year career representing defendants challenging their convictions and sentences. His clients included more than a half-dozen Death Row inmates, including Clarence Ray Allen, whose execution in January 2006 was the last held in California. At the time of Satris’ death, he was preparing for a state Supreme Court hearing in a major case involving the rights of sex offenders to be considered for parole.

But his most enduring legacy may be the project he and a UC Davis law school classmate, Paul Comiskey, launched after graduation in 1976: the Prison Law Office, first located in a converted hot dog stand next to San Quentin State Prison.

The office, now based in Berkeley, was the nation’s first private organization dedicated to representing inmates in their challenges to prison conditions and terms of confinement. It was established in a state with the nation’s largest prison population and some of its longest sentences. Comiskey left shortly after for a religious career, but Satris remained in charge for six years, filing suits that led to improvement of conditions at San Quentin and on its Death Row.

Under its current executive director, Donald Specter, whom Satris hired out of law school, the office pursued cases that resulted in breakthroughs — a federal judge’s appointment of a receiver in 2006 to supervise health care in California prisons, where shoddy treatment and conditions were killing an inmate a day; and a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the overcrowded prisons to lower their population by more than 40,000 to help bring health care up to minimal standards.

“Without Michael, the Prison Law Office would not exist,” Specter said. “He was tireless in his advocacy for people involved in the criminal justice system. … His work touched thousands of people’s lives and many would still be in prison, but for Michael’s efforts.”

Satris was among a small group of attorneys dedicated to the rights of “a group of highly unpopular human beings,” prisoners serving life sentences, said J. Anthony Kline, a state appeals court justice in San Francisco whose court assigned numerous cases to Satris.

His daughter, Marthine Satris, said she asked him why he represented someone like Allen, who while serving a life sentence in Folsom prison for murder, was sentenced to death for arranging the murders of a prosecution witness and two others outside prison. At the time of his execution a quarter-century later, Allen was 76, the oldest person ever put to death in California, and moved mostly by wheelchair. Satris’ family said he had worked day and night imploring then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant clemency.

“He said, ‘You have to make sure the guilty have justice just as much,’” his daughter recalled.

“He saw the best in everyone,” said Bonnie Jones, his wife of 43 years. She said Satris called himself “an old hippie.”

Like most lawyers specializing in criminal appeals, Satris lost more cases than he won. But in 2004 and 2005, he persuaded a California appeals court that neither the state parole board nor Schwarzenegger could base their denial of parole to a San Mateo County man, Walter Scott, on the circumstances of his 1986 murder of a drug dealer who was having an affair with Scott’s wife.

The rulings were forerunners of a 2008 California Supreme Court decision, in a case not involving Satris, that barred both the parole board and the governor from relying entirely on the facts of a prisoner’s past crime to deny parole.

Another Satris case involved Proposition 57, the 2016 initiative that made thousands of inmates eligible for parole consideration after serving the primary sentence for their crime, before serving additional years or decades for such things as prior convictions and gang membership.

Prop. 57 did not apply to prisoners convicted of specific violent crimes. State prison officials adopted rules saying inmates convicted of sex crimes were also ineligible for early parole consideration, but Satris won a state appeals court ruling in January 2019 that said the state’s regulations were unauthorized by Prop. 57.

The state Supreme Court then agreed to review the issue, and had scheduled a hearing in September. Jones, his wife, said Satris filed his last arguments on the case on July 29 from their home in Bolinas, where they had lived since 1986.

An avid surfer, he then rode his bicycle into town to check out the surf. After having a lemonade, he started pedaling back and collapsed on a dirt road 300 or 400 feet from home and was found without a pulse, his wife said. She said the cause of his death was not determined.

Survivors include Jones and two daughters, Marthine and Gigi Satris, and two grandchildren. The family requests donations to the Prison Law Office or other nonprofits for inmates: the Humane Prison Hospice Project, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children or the Prison University Project at San Quentin.