The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates is a book by John Temple about the coura­geous work of a death penal­ty defense attor­ney in the south. Ken Rose is an attor­ney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina. He has han­dled many cap­i­tal cas­es, but the focus of this book is his defense of Bo Jones, a men­tal­ly hand­i­capped farm­hand con­vict­ed of a mur­der that occurred in 1987 and sen­tenced to death. The case high­lights issues such as inad­e­quate defense, men­tal retar­da­tion, men­tal ill­ness and wit­ness tes­ti­mo­ny. Based on over four years of behind-the-scenes report­ing, The Last Lawyer tells the sto­ry of how Rose’s work even­tu­al­ly led to the dis­missal of all charges against Jones in 2008.

(J. Temple, The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates, University Press of Mississippi (2009)). See Books and Innocence.

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