THE LAST LAWYER: THE FIGHT TO SAVE DEATH ROW INMATES
Today is the launch date for The Last Lawyer, an inspiring new nonfiction book that syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts called “a compulsively readable indictment of a fatally flawed system. It reads like first-class legal fiction, but it’s far more compelling because it is, tragically, legal fact.”
North Carolina attorney Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the country. The new book chronicles Rose’s decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. It’s the most frustrating case Ken has encountered in his 25 years as a capital appeals attorney – a landmark legal case that has received scant attention from judges or journalists. The case involves the thorniest issues of death penalty law: inadequate defense, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony. Yet for many years, Ken’s arguments gain no traction, and Bo Jones comes within three days of his date with the needle.
The book follows Ken through a decade of setbacks and triumphs as he gradually unearths the evidence he hopes will save his client’s life. At the same time, Ken also single-handedly builds a nonprofit law firm that becomes a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South. The Last Lawyer gives readers deep access to the inner workings of a capital defense team; no other nonfiction book has told this kind of story from the lawyer’s point of view. The book is based on four-and-a-half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by journalism professor/nonfiction author John Temple.
For more information, to order the book, or to arrange for the author to speak with your group, visit John Temple’s website at http://johntemplebooks.com/. The direct link on Amazon is http://bit.ly/DRl8o. John’s wife, Hollee, blogged about what happened to their family during the course of the book’s reporting on her blog today at beckyandhollee.com/blog.


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