Never Too Late: A Prosecutor's Story of Justice in the Medgar Evars Case - Couverture souple

Delaughter, Bobby

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1416575162 ISBN 13 : 9781416575160

Editeur : Scribner, 2007

Synopsis

Book by Delaughter Bobby

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One: A Curiosity

It was Sunday, October 1, 1989, and the morning paper had just arrived. Clad in my robe and slippers, my first cup of coffee in hand, I groggily made my way out the front door, across the sidewalk, and down the driveway. I stooped to pick up the paper.

Back inside, I poured another cup of Maxwell House and flipped through the headlines of the various sections of the Clarion-Ledger to see what I wanted to read first. Zsa Zsa Gabor had been convicted of slapping a cop in Los Angeles. Mississippi author Willie Morris had come out with another book, Good Old Boy and the Witch of Yazoo, and a storm was brewing over the federal response to Hurricane Hugo.

No storm brewing here in Jackson, Mississippi, though. Forecast for the day: mostly sunny with only a slight chance of rain and an expected high of seventy-seven degrees. The prediction appeared to be on the mark as I glanced out of the kitchen window. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and bright sunshine was gradually shooting over the eastern horizon. No storm brewing here.

I settled down on the couch and began my reading in earnest. "State Checked Possible Jurors in Evers Slaying," read the front-page headline. Jerry Mitchell, whose assignment included the courthouse beat, had written the article. His bright orange hair and matching necktie against a customary lime green shirt made him a somewhat conspicuous presence in the courtroom. My dealings with Jerry had been positive, and I had never minded discussing with him what I ethically could about any of my cases.

Although Jerry's normal beat included the trials and general goings-on around the courthouse, lately he had been following a tangent involving the 1960s racial strife in Mississippi. Since the movie Mississippi Burning had come out, everything penned by Jerry had racial overtones. Initially, his articles had dealt with, as had Mississippi Burning, the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Next, a series of articles appeared on a defunct state agency called the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, established in the 1950s. Its initial purpose was to perpetuate segregation in the state, and it evolved into a state-operated spy corps. When the commission shut down in the early 1970s, the Mississippi legislature ordered all of its records sealed until well into the next century. The ACLU and several individual plaintiffs, trying to have the records opened to the public, had taken their cause to federal court.

Jerry had apparently obtained some access to a portion of these records. His October 1, 1989, article claimed that agency documents revealed that the Sovereignty Commission had investigated prospective jurors in the second 1964 trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

Both trials resulted in hung juries, and Beckwith was released following the second. The article I was reading implied that an investigator with the Sovereignty Commission had tampered with the jury, and even quoted one of my law school professors, Aaron Condon, as saying that jury tampering was possible.

As I read, questions went through my mind. According to the article, Andy Hopkins, the investigator involved, was dead, so even if his actions constituted jury tampering and the statute of limitations had not run, the culprit was certainly beyond the long arm of the law. Nevertheless, a seed of curiosity had been planted, and it caused me to reflect on the 1960s. I was not, however, thinking about the Beatles, bell-bottom pants, or Joe Namath. I was conjuring up other memories that had long since been shoved to the dark recesses of my brain. What did I remember about the racial strife in 1960s Mississippi, and in particular, what did I recall about Byron De La Beckwith's 1964 trials?

I thought back to my first visit to the University of Mississippi campus nestled in the small hamlet of Oxford. It was 1962 in the wake of James Meredith's forced admission to the Ole Miss Law School, and my mother had a cousin living on campus. Riots had broken out, the Kennedys had sent in federal troops to restore and maintain order, and we (my mother, little brother, and I) went along with my aunt to check on our cousin and her husband, who was also in law school. He is now a federal judge; James Meredith is a former aide to ultraconservative U.S. senator Jesse Helms; and the Ole Miss Law School, only a few years ago, mourned the death of its African-American dean, who suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting New Orleans. Things have, indeed, changed.

I was eight then, and my brother, Mike, was half that age. The campus didn't look like any school I had ever seen, not that I had seen many, if any, colleges. That place, however, looked more like the army-occupied towns that I had seen in television episodes of Combat than any school. It was a place of wonder for little boys. Pup tents stretched as far as the eye could see across the intramural fields (where the athletic dorm now stands), and a soldier stood at every door.

Lt. Gov. Paul Johnson would be elected Mississippi's next governor by a landslide for taking a stand at the campus's main entrance, refusing to allow Meredith and his federal entourage to enter. I went to a political rally with my parents at Poindexter Park during that gubernatorial campaign, sporting a button with Johnson's slogan: Stand Tall with Paul!

Also standing tall at Ole Miss was a great-uncle of mine, Buddie Newman, who was then a state legislator and would eventually become the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, arguably the most powerful position in state government at the time.

Still, in later years, I discovered that a local judge actively involved with the state power structure was also at that campus entrance. Judge Russel Moore was of the "old school" in Mississippi politics. A staunch segregationist in the 1960s, as most white Mississippians then were, he, like my uncle Buddie, served as one of Gov. Ross Barnett's top advisers and supporters. Also like my uncle and many others, however, Russel later experienced a change of heart. I married his stepdaughter Dixie, named after the Ole Miss fight song.

I met Dixie during the summer of 1973. I had known since I was in the ninth grade that I wanted to be a lawyer and had planned my education since then around that ambition. When we met, Dixie and I were nineteen years old, an age when most of my friends had not yet decided what to do with their lives. As Dixie and I began dating, I soon realized that I had found someone who understood my goals. The man she called Dad was a circuit judge. She had heard the law discussed and had been around it most of her life.

To the dismay of both families, we married in November 1973. We were determined to make our own way in the world, and once that became apparent to Judge Moore and he realized that I was not looking for any handouts, our relationship softened and warmed.

Judge Moore and I practiced law together for a few years after he retired from the bench. He was a friend as well as a father-in-law. We often discussed politics and dissected points of law. Novel legal questions and arguments intrigued both of us.

As I read my newspaper that Sunday morning in October 1989, I had clear recollections of my early boyhood of 1962. One thing, though, of which I had little or no memory was the assassination of Medgar Evers the following year and the ensuing trials of Byron De La Beckwith.

I vaguely recalled friends of my parents' visiting in our home, or vice versa, and the subject of the trials being brought up. The jury was still out, and someone made the statement that, while Beckwith was guilty, the state couldn't prove it. He would probably not be convicted, and surely they (the jury) would not impose the death penalty even if he were by chance found guilty. That's all that I could remember.

Dixie wasn't at home. She was gone a lot since going to work for the Clarion-Ledger circulation department. Most mornings, it was up to me to rouse our three kids: Burt, ten, Claire, six, and Drew, four. I couldn't linger too long reading the paper. It was time to get them ready for church.

Hinds County is one of the few in Mississippi that has two county seats: Jackson and Raymond. Jackson, the capital and largest city in the state, is where our offices are housed and where we try the majority of our cases. Raymond, a small Civil War-era town, is situated in the rural area of the county.

Most crimes committed outside the Jackson metropolitan area are tried in the Raymond courthouse. It's a two-story structure, with massive white columns, built by slave labor and used as a hospital in the Civil War. That's where I was heading the next morning to help my boss, District Attorney Ed Peters, try the Trussell case.

A teacher at the local community college had been attacked in a school bathroom. She wasn't raped, but she had the ever-living hell beat out of her, and before the assailant was caught, he phoned her repeatedly and told her all that he would have liked to have done to her. By tracing these calls, the police had found him.

I played out our case in my mind as I drove. Ed would pick the jury, I would deliver the opening statement and put on our case, and then Ed would cross-examine the defense witnesses. We would split the closing argument. Such was the way we normally divided the labor in the cases that Ed and I tried together, and frankly, I thought we made a helluva team.

Ed had been district attorney for seventeen years. He is quick on his feet and shoots from the hip -- but with deadly accuracy. Tall and lanky, he is a formidable presence in the courtroom. His slow Southern drawl and pleasant manner have lured many defendants into his trap during cross-examination, only to realize their mistake too late. Ed's demeanor then becomes that of a predator -- lithe, quick, and lethal. This persona, combined with his prematurely gray hair, has earned him the nickname the Silver Fox.

It's hard to imagine Hinds County without Ed Peters as its DA. He has become a fixture on which everybody depends, but takes for granted.

Shortly after the courthouse renovation was completed and we moved in, someone called the office and inquired as to the identity of the two large statues atop the building. The secretary, without hesitation, correctly identified for the caller the one facing north as Moses, but instead of relating that the other one was Socrates, she said, "And we think the other one is Mr. Peters."

Conversely, I am more organized, methodical, and research-wise. Plus, with ten years of private practice under my belt as a defense attorney, I was able to predict many strategic moves of my adversaries. We complemented each other quite well and with good results. I had not lost a case in the two years I had been at the DA's office.

I neared the courthouse square, found a place to park, grabbed my file, and hustled inside. Jurors were making their way up the more-than-century-old stairs, which creaked with each step. I stuck my head in the court clerk's office first, where all of the court personnel gathered for coffee and gossip. Barbara Dunn, the clerk, was there, along with her deputy clerks, Patsy and Martha. Fortunately, Ed, Judge L. Breland Hilburn, the court reporter Kaye K. Kerr, and the two bailiffs, Steve Libenschek and Jeff Murray, were there, as well. Nobody had gone up to the courtroom yet. Nothing is more embarrassing than walking into a courtroom with the judge on the bench and jurors waiting.

While I don't remember all that we talked about as we waited for all of the jurors to report in, I know it was not the Beckwith case or Jerry Mitchell's article of the day before. We had a case to try and the day was spent on jury selection.

Tuesday morning, though, when I unfurled the morning paper, I noticed that Jerry had written another article about the Beckwith case. This time, it wasn't about a tangential issue like jury tampering. This one said that Myrlie Evers, widow of the slain civil rights leader, wanted the case reopened if the evidence was available.

During one of our breaks, I noticed the day's Clarion-Ledger folded on a table in Barbara's office. The article about Myrlie Evers was visible. I asked Ed what he thought about it, what our response was going to be, if we had one. He said that a request to reopen the case came up every so often and his response was always that there was no constitutional way, and any first-year law student knows it.

Ed's plan was simply to ignore it; once again, it would just go away. That made sense to me. After all, it had been twenty-six years, and our state supreme court had reversed cases for delays of only a few years. There was no reason to give a second thought to any attempt to launch a case in which we would immediately get shot out of the water on speedy-trial grounds. We finished Trussell's trial the next day -- with a conviction.

"It will just go away." Go away? What in life ever just goes away forever? Sooner or later, in the great circle of life, all things, good and evil, pleasures and irritants, resurface, like the proverbial bad penny, and leave their mark on those whom fate puts in the path. We may temporarily ignore the elements and forces in our world, to be sure, but ignore, for instance, a deep wound, and it will only fester.

In October 1989, I wasn't sure whether the Beckwith case was a bad penny or a festering wound, but it became evident to me that it was not just going to quietly evaporate.

Public reaction to Mitchell's articles was immediate and divisive. Monday, October 9, at the Hinds County Board of Supervisors' meeting, Supervisor Bennie Thompson (now a U.S. congressman) moved for the board to pass a resolution asking Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore and Ed Peters to reopen the Beckwith case. It failed when nobody seconded the motion.

George Smith, then the county's only other black supervisor in addition to Thompson, said the request, if it came, should come from Myrlie Evers. There was, of course, an article in the paper the next day detailing the motion and the vote, and in Wednesday's edition an editorial asked why the supervisors remained quiet when they should have gone on record for justice.

But, if there was no evidence, where would the justice be in reopening the case? If the law was clear that it could not be done, would there be justice in ignoring the law and reprosecuting the case anyway? It seemed to me that the Clarion-Ledger was saying, "Damn the Constitution, damn the law, damn the evidence or the lack thereof; we want this case reprosecuted and don't confuse us with the law and the evidence." For our reluctance to rush out and indict someone before getting any evidence, Ed and I were labeled by some as racists.

Conversely, I also received calls and letters from people on the opposite end of the spectrum, who hoped we were not considering reopening the case, no matter what the law was or what evidence we ever amassed. The decision to prosecute any case should be based upon the law and the evidence, but to this group, Beckwith's guilt was not the issue. I was repeatedly told, "We know he's guilty, everybody knows that; but that's not the point." As incredible as I found such statements, I decided to listen and learn. As misguided as it was, the feeling was there, and if I didn't find a way to deal with it, there was no hope of ever winning over a jury drawn from people with this attitude.

So, I would ask, "What is the point?" Without exception, I got one of four responses: "He's too old"...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

In June 12, 1963, Mississippi's fast-rising NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith escaped conviction twice at the hands of all-white Southern juries, and his crime went unpunished for more than three decades. Now, from Bobby DeLaughter, one of the most celebrated prosecutors in modern American law, comes the blistering account of his remarkable crusade in 1994 finally to bring the assassin of Medgar Evers to justice.

This is the fascinating, real-life story of the assistant district attorney -- played by Alec Baldwin in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi -- who brought closure to one of the darkest chapters of the civil rights movement.

When the district attorney's office in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to reopen the case, the obstacles in its way were overwhelming: missing court records; transcripts that were more than thirty years old; original evidence that had been lost; new testimony that had to be taken regarding long-ago events; and the perception throughout the state that a reprosecution was a futile endeavor. But step by painstaking step, DeLaughter and his team overcame the obstacles and built their case.

With taut prose that reads like a great detective thriller, Never Too Late is a page-turner of the very highest order. It charts the course of a country lawyer who, concerned about the collective soul of his community and the nature of American justice in general, dared to revisit a thirty-one-year-old case -- one so incendiary that everyone warned him not to touch it -- and win a long-overdue conviction. DeLaughter's success in this trial stands today as a landmark in the annals of criminal prosecution, and this bracing first-person account brings the saga to life as never before.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Scribner
• Date d'édition: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1416575162
• ISBN 13: 9781416575160
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 328