E-Book Overview
The Last Lawyer is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client's final sentence.Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The Last Lawyer chronicles Rose's decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty-five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's original defense. Yet for many years, Rose's advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution.The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small triumphs as he gradually unearthed the evidence he hoped would save his client's life. At the same time, Rose also single-handedly built a nonprofit law firm that became a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South.The Last Lawyer offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a capital defense team. Based on four and a half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by a journalism professor and nonfiction author, The Last Lawyer tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer's fight for justice.
E-Book Content
THE LAST LAWYER
THE LAST LAWYER
The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates
John Temple University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2009 by John Temple All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2009 ∞ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Temple, John, 1969– The last lawyer : the fight to save death row inmates / John Temple. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-60473-355-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Rose, Ken, 1956– 2. Jones, Levon. 3. Death row inmates— North Carolina. 4. Trials (Murder)—North Carolina. 5. Capital punishment—United States. I. Title. HV8701.J66T46 2009 364.66092—dc22
2009010826
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
“Every lawyer gets at least one case in his lifetime that affects him personally. This one’s mine, I guess.” —ATTICUS FINCH, To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
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THE LAST LAWYER
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MISSISSIPPI STATE PENITENTIARY AT PARCHMAN June 21, 1989
The roads around Parchman Farm run straight as the flight of a bullet. Even at sixty miles per hour, the flat cotton fields of the Mississippi delta stretch motionless in the distance. Clusters of convicts in bright white jumpsuits and red caps work the fields, hoes swinging up and chopping down in ragged tandem. Over the rush of wind come snatches of a baritone work song or the bark of an order from a White Hat guard slouched in his saddle, a .45 on his hip. Ken Rose had made the long drive from Jackson to the penitentiary work farm in Parchman dozens of times over the previous five years, often picking up a bucket of fried chicken along the way to share with a client. The young lawyer had spent untold hours in the visiting room, hunching slightly to peer through the shoebox-sized hole in the metal grate. Sometimes he played chess with a privileged inmate on one of the benches in the scorching penitentiary yard. Or, if the client wanted to stretch his legs, they’d play one-on-one on the hard-packed red dirt basketball court with its lone hoop and chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. The basketball court was on the same side of C Tier as the death house. The small square annex topped with a tall white chimn