The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates [Hardcover]

John Temple (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 24, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. For years, lawyer Ken Rose has fought to save wrongly-condemned prisoners; chronicling the story of Rose and death row inmate Bo Jones, author Temple (Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office) finds high drama in Raleigh penitentiaries, North Carolina backroads, cramped law offices, and sweltering courtrooms. Investigators, criminals, judges, witnesses, and attorneys are all finely, vividly drawn in this disturbing account of a justice system hijacked by officials whose prime interest is finding criminals to execute: "Even if Bo Jones wasn't one of the worst of the worst, they pursued him because he was one of the ones they could get." Reviewing the original 1987 murder, the consequent trials and endless hearings, Temple creates an intimate portrait of Rose and his Center for Death Penalty Litigation as they trudge through a decade of work on this case, a typical example that pits the odds and public opinion against them: "To question capital punishment was to appear soft on crime... In court, one well known district attorney sported a golden lapel pin shaped like a hangman's noose." Ultimately, Temple's account is a stand-up-and cheer account of one man standing up for justice.

Review

"For years, lawyer Ken Rose has fought to save wrongly-condemned prisoners; chronicling the story of Rose and death row inmate Bo Jones, author Temple (Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office) finds high drama in Raleigh penitentiaries, North Carolina backroads, cramped law offices, and sweltering courtrooms. Reviewing the original 1987 murder, the consequent trials and endless hearings, Temple creates an intimate portrait of Rose and his Center for Death Penalty Litigation as they trudge through a decade of work on this case, a typical example that pits the odds and public opinion against them: "To question capital punishment was to appear soft on crime… In court, one well known district attorney sported a golden lapel pin shaped like a hangman's noose." Ultimately, Temple's account is a stand-up-and cheer account of one man standing up for justice."

Publishers Weekly, starred review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (September 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1604733551
• ISBN-13: 978-1604733556
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,011,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Temple is an associate professor of journalism at West Virginia University. He teaches reporting and writing courses at the P.I. Reed School of Journalism.

Temple is the author of Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner's Office, published in 2005, and The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates, winner of the 2010 Scribes Book Award.

Prior to teaching at WVU, Temple taught and studied creative nonfiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh, where he earned an M.F.A. Temple worked in the newspaper business for six years. He was the health/education reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a general assignment reporter for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., and a government and politics reporter for the Tampa Tribune in Tampa, Fla.

Temple lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, with his wife, law professor Hollee Schwartz Temple, and their two sons.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON TEMPLE OR ANY OF HIS BOOKS, CHECK OUT HIS WEB SITE AT WWW.JOHNTEMPLEBOOKS.COM

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, well written. Eye-opening intro to issues of IQ testing in such cases November 19, 2009

By Kevin Mcgrew

Format:Hardcover

I just finished reading "The Last Lawyer" last night. I would recommend it to anyone who has not been privy to the lengthy, complex and personal winding road of death penalty appeals and the court proceedings. I agree with Leonard Pitts (one of my favorite syndicated columnist) who, on the book jacket, describes the book as reading "like first-class legal fiction, but it's far more compelling because it is, tragically, legal fact." So true. It was an extremely easy read and felt like story unfolding before me. I found myself frequently saying "just one more short chapter" before going to bed. Extremely well written.

Readers of my blog ([...]) will likely find the later half of the book (starting on page 130) particularly interesting (and sobering) as the use of intelligence test scores and the diagnosis of MR/ID becomes a major point of the story. How some of those in the legal field (and one judge in particular) played with the IQ scores and failed to recognize that they are imperfect measures (the need to recognize measurement error) is eye-opening and sobering to those of us involved in intelligence testing development and research.

I give it two big thumbs up.

Dr. Kevin McGrew
Educational Psychologist
Director, Institute for Applied Psychometrics

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Un-put-downable! November 16, 2009

By Helen Parsonage

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I read this book in two evenings--it was very hard to put down. "The Last Lawyer" gives a well-written and compelling look at the work of capital postconviction defense. Whether you agree with the death penalty or not, I highly recommend this to you.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars a great book November 12, 2009

By Danny

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I finished The Last Lawyer late last night. It is a great book.

This is a suspenseful story written without overly dramatizing and without synthetic suspense prose. It makes the legal system (almost) comprehensible to the average person. The people are presented in a compelling manner with all their humanity on display, neither deified nor condemned, just presented with understanding and humor. The objectivity is laudable and is a lamentably lonely and badly needed model for journalists and non-fiction writers. This book will do a lot to help people understand the conundrum of death penalty law and practice, and it will be effective in part because the author reports the situation as he saw it without proselytizing. He neither pushs a viewpoint nor avoids saying what he sees. The people he admires have quirks and faults; those he doesn't have likable qualities. The writing seems very unselfconscious in this respect, which disarms the reader so accustomed to being manipulated by writers.

One important thing of many that I learned is the point of view of the prosecutor, that if the death penalty weren't on the books, it would scale down the punishments for murder. I had never realized that aspect, the huge role plea bargaining plays in the whole system. We will never know (my guess) about the motivational role of the death penalty in discouraging murder, but it does seem reasonable to predict easier punishments resulting from its abolition, and to me that's a serious problem. The greatest tragedy (except for murder victims) of it all seems to me the huge time delays in resolving cases. Living on death row for 20 years - I can't see any benefit to anyone in that. Lessening the penalty for murder is a major concern, probably more important than the handful of executions that actually occur.

Of course, the shoddy incompetence of the Bo Jones prosecution is lamentable. The legal system must be reformed! But, then again, does it work any less effectively than any of our other institutions? Probably not, but the consequences can be devastating for individuals. Who shall reform it? Not single minded zealots like Ken and company for sure. It seems to be our lot as humans in a society to have our institutions swing back and forth between imperfect positions. Maybe they just reflect our nature as humans - imperfectible.