The Last Lawyer (2009) is the true story of a tireless legal samaritan and his warfare on the injustice of capital punishment and his fight to save death row inmates.
Hardback: 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 Levon 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. Initially, inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's cause. 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, it tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer's fight for justice.
About the author: John Temple is an associate professor of journalism and associate dean at West Virginia University. He is the author of Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office (2005). His new book project is related to prescription drug abuse - it offers news and research about the impact of prescription drugs in America.
Other books of interest: Merrilyn Thomas, Life on Death Row: One Man's Fight Against Racism and The Death Penalty (Paladin, 1991).
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