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Begin forwarded message:
From: Julien Ball <julienball@hotmail.com>
Date: December 16, 2009 9:05:01 AM CST
To: CEDP National <cedp_national_office@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [CEDP] Book puts death penalty on trial
http://www.chapelhillnews.com/ news/story/ 54180.html Book puts death penalty on trial
Kleinschmidt is a protagonist
"There were times in there when I really wondered: Am I going to be following this case for 20 years?" Temple said.
But five years later, Temple is able to tell the story of the center's efforts to save Jones from lethal injection in his new book, "The Last Lawyer."
The book takes a reader into the tangled web of death-penalty jurisprudence, where judges and prosecutors look all too human and life or death decisions sometimes hang on hapless defense attorneys. Temple doesn't spare his protagonists either: former CDPL director Ken Rose, the hero of the story, uses his condescending "West Point look" on colleagues who have disappointed him; Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, another center lawyer, reveals a smoking habit.
"It does a good job of capturing the stress and the anxiety," said Kleinschmidt. "It may reveal more ... than we may have felt comfortable with."
But Rose gave Temple the access because he believes the public would not tolerate the current death-penalty system if people understood how it works. Jones, with a low IQ and mental illness, went to death row based on no evidence of his guilt other than the testimony of his impoverished ex-girlfriend whom prosecutors had paid to testify.
"He was poor. He had no money. He was borderline mentally retarded. He had serious issues with mental illness. He had difficulty assisting his trial counsel and assisting with his defense," Rose said. "Those were the reasons why he was convicted and sentenced to death, and that shouldn't be."
"The Last Lawyer" leaves open the question of Jones' innocence; an ineffective justice system bears the only clear burden of guilt in the story. His co-defendant Larry Lamb remains in prison, for life, based solely on testimony from the same witness.
"It's a burning question in this case," Rose said of who actually killed bootlegger Leamon Grady in Duplin County. "It is open-ended in the book. It is incredibly disturbing. We didn't get that [answer, in the book], and we didn't get that in real life."
Temple said he had to come to terms with that early in the process, so he could focus on painting a real-life portrait of Rose and his colleagues.
"I understood that I was never going to know and no one was ever going to know," he said. "That's never going to be found out. The investigation was so cold by the time they even identified Bo Jones as a suspect. There was not some kind of big-time investigation where you could go back and kind of dig something up."
Rather than a typical "murder mystery," "The Last Lawyer" is more like a "conviction mystery," asking, how did Bo Jones end up on death row? The book follows the case from a failed attempt at "appropriate relief" on grounds of mental illness and inadequate defense in Duplin County, to Jones' day in federal court.
The eventual outcome shocked Jones' lawyers, and this article will not spoil the ending for readers unfamiliar with the case. "The Last Lawyer," despite its weighty content, reads like a story, a piece of narrative nonfiction with the characterization and scene-setting of a novel.
Durham attorney Jay Ferguson enjoyed it for its realism. "That's what a lot of lawyers deal with on a daily basis," he said.
Temple, whose previous book described the lives of coroners, set out to write a book on lawyers and ended up latching onto one particular case.
"[The books are] about unusual jobs - jobs that a lot of people wouldn't want but are really interesting and sort of dramatic," he said. "[For my next book] I want to do something a little lighter than the last two subjects. Something without death in the title."
Rose said Temple took a complicated topic and translated it for a lay reader. He hopes the book will result in more cases getting a federal hearing and perhaps influence legislators to shield mentally ill convicts from capital punishment, as a current bill in the General Assembly proposes.
"I would like [readers] to see how often justice in capital cases can be a crapshoot," Rose said. "Most lawyers don't get this stuff .. and, for the public, it's just very difficult. John ... really spent a lot of time trying figure this stuff out."
