Susan Jordan, a Ukiah, Calif., criminal defense attorney known for zealously advocating on behalf of women, died in a plane crash in Utah on Friday. She was 67.

Jordan and longtime friend John Austin, a health-care executive, were flying Austin's home-built single-engine plane when they crashed, the Ukiah Daily Journal reported. The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane hit power lines in the town of Escalante, which sits near the hilly Bryce Canyon National Park.

Jordan got her pilot's license in 1981 and had more than 3,500 hours of flight experience, according to her Web site. Friend and fellow attorney Cristina Arguedas said Austin was flying the plane.

Arguedas met Jordan shortly after Jordan won an acquittal in the 1977 case that made her name, People v. Inez Garcia. Jordan successfully argued to a Monterey County, Calif., jury that Garcia had acted in self-defense when she shot to death a man who had raped her.

Arguedas, then 24 and a law student at Rutgers University, was dispatched by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City to help Jordan with her next case: defending a woman who had shot a man entering her home early in the morning.

"All of this had to do with educating the public and the courts ... . It was part of redefining rape as a crime of violence instead of a sexual crime," Arguedas said. "If not for her, I wouldn't be a criminal lawyer."

In 1978, Jordan represented Emily Harris in the Patricia Hearst kidnapping case. More recently, she represented former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olsen on charges of conspiracy to bomb police officers.

Jordan spent her life defending those she thought had been victimized by the government, or who were otherwise powerless or oppressed, said William Osterhoudt, a friend and former law partner of Jordan's.

Osterhoudt said he first met Jordan in the 1970s, when she represented some of those called before federal grand juries investigating dissent during the Nixon administration.

"We called her a 'movement lawyer,'" Osterhoudt said.

At a time when judges and juries weren't used to seeing women as trial lawyers, Jordan was forceful in court and not afraid to pursue an aggressive line of examination, Osterhoudt said.

"I just thought she was courageous for discarding all of that mythology that came down to us," he said.

Beginning around the passage of California's Compassionate Use Act, in 1996, Jordan became very interested in medical marijuana, Osterhoudt said.

Both he and Arguedas said they last spoke with Jordan a few weeks ago, and that the conversations dealt with the changing federal and state climate around marijuana.

Arguedas said that Jordan wanted help getting in touch with Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, D-San Francisco, who recently proposed legislation to legalize and tax marijuana.

Osterhoudt and Jordan had teamed up to represent the Compassionate Collective of Alameda County, a medical marijuana dispensary that was raided in 2007.

When Osterhoudt last spoke with Jordan, he said, she was brainstorming ways to help persuade the Obama administration to "ease up" on its enforcement of marijuana laws.

"She felt that change was in the wind," he said.

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