Paperback: "If it was for the good of mankind, for the good of our state, and for what was right twenty-five years ago, if the courts allow it, and if I ever get enough evidence, a similar stand would still be right today. Does that which is right and just wane with the passage of time?"
A single blast from a 1917 Enfield .30-06 rifle, fired shortly after midnight in the early-morning hours of 12 June 1963, from a thicket of sweet gum and honeysuckle in Jackson, Mississippi, had, and is still having, such an effect.
It ended the life of Medgar Evers, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) in Mississippi, and it followed his white assassin, Byron De La Beckwith VI, who was tried unsuccessfully twice in 1964 by all-white juries for murdering the man he later described as "Mississippi's mightiest nigger."
A quarter century later, the ripples emanating from that shot tore through the heart and soul of a third person - an unsuspecting and rather unlikely one - a white prosecuting attorney who tried to free himself of the shackles of his past and assumed the challenge of rebuilding the case against Beckwith.
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.
"But I felt that Mississippi and I were being put to the test. We say that no man is above the law; but what if he is seventy years old? We claim that we value all human life; but what if the life is that of a civil rights activist in 1963 Mississippi? There is no statute limitations for murder; but what if it's been a quarter century? In pursuing justice and maintaining freedom, how much taxpayer money is too much? Finally, if justice has never been finalized in such a despicable and immoral atrocity and pursuing it will open an old wound, is it not then a wound that needs to be reopened and cleansed, instead of continuing to fester over the years, spreading its poison to future generations?"
On 5 February 1994, thirty-one years later, he played an instrumental role in securing for the Evers family those long-elusive words, "We, the jury, find the defendant guilty, as charged." For the Everses, those words brought some degree of closure. For Mississippi, it was an exorcism of sorts.
With the world watching, the state cast out many demons of racism that had possessed it for so many years. (from the Prologue)
Never Too Late (2001) is the true and complete story of one of the most important and unusual cases of criminal prosecution in American history. "It tells a story that stays with you - a story about conscience. Bobby DeLaughter and Myrlie Evers: two who grew in conscience, courage, and trust." As a book lives or dies on its inherent life-giving truth and passion, this story, I believe, will endure." (from the Author's Note and Introduction)
About the author: Bobby DeLaughter was a judge in the Hinds CountyCourt, Jackson, Mississippi. He graduated from Ole Miss Law School in 1977 and is a former assistant district attorney and a past president of the Mississippi Proseutor's Association. He is a graduate of the FBI's National Law Institute and has served as lawyer-in-residence at the Pepperdine University Law School.
Over a career spanning three decades, Bobby was a criminal defense attorney, prosecutor, and trial judge. His career in law ended in 2009, with a federal conviction of obstruction of justice, for giving a false statement to FBI agents. After serving his federal sentence, Bobby and Peggy, his wife of over twenty years, adopted New Orleans, Louisiana as their home. They live in the famous (or infamous) French Quarter, the setting of Bobby’s new series of Bo Landry thrillers.
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