In his new book, ​“The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice,” author David Rose exam­ines issues of race and the death penal­ty. The book relates the sto­ry of Carlton Gary, who was con­vict­ed of cap­i­tal mur­der in 1986 and remains on Georgia’s death row for the rape and mur­der of sev­er­al elder­ly women in Columbus, Georgia. Rose, a con­tribut­ing edi­tor at Vanity Fair, links Gary’s con­vic­tion to a his­to­ry of bias in Columbus and the South.

​“The Big Eddy Club” details the con­nec­tions between past and present Southern jus­tice and uses these links to fur­ther exam­ine the broad­er issues of race, cor­rup­tion, and the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Rose main­tains that racism in Columbus may have result­ed in an unfair tri­al for Gary. His inves­ti­ga­tion of the case found that many of the com­mu­ni­ty’s promi­nent judges and attor­neys, as well as most of the vic­tims, were fre­quenters of the Big Eddy Club, an exclu­sive all-white club in Columbus. He also reveals a con­nec­tion between the Gary case and a 1912 lynch­ing of a black man who had been tried for mur­der and acquit­ted. Rose found that the tri­al judge first assigned to Gary’s case in 1984 was the son of the mob leader who led the even­tu­al lynch­ing.
(The New Press, 2007; post­ed June 19, 2007). See Books and Race.

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