News Brief — Crusading Capital Defense Lawyer Millard Farmer Dies at 85

NEWS (3/​20/​20): Georgia — Crusading civ­il rights and death-penal­ty defense lawyer Millard Farmer (pic­tured, left, in 1980), age 85, has died. Farmer, a relent­less fight­er against racism and dis­crim­i­na­tion, devel­oped a con­tro­ver­sial style of lit­i­ga­tion he called ​“con­flic­tion­eer­ing,” in which he took direct aim at judges, pros­e­cu­tors, and law enforce­ment offi­cials whose big­otry he believed was pro­mot­ing or pro­tect­ing unjust appli­ca­tion of the criminal laws.

Farmer’s suc­cess­es includ­ed the case of the ​“Dawson Five,” five young black men and teens charged with mur­der­ing a white cus­tomer in a Dawson, Georgia con­ve­nience store in 1976. Prosecutors dropped all charges after Farmer pre­sent­ed evi­dence of sys­temic abus­es against the black com­mu­ni­ty by Terrell County police and con­vinced a local judge that police in ​“Terrible Terrell” had coerced a false con­fes­sion by hold­ing a gun to the head of one of the defendants. 

The leg­endary New York Times reporter Tom Wicker described the sound of Farmer’s Southern drawl as that of ​“a bull­frog with laryn­gi­tis,” a label Farmer and his sup­port­ers affec­tion­ate­ly embraced. He was regard­ed as a men­tor to a gen­er­a­tion of cap­i­tal defense lawyers who entered the field in the 1980s.

Towards the end of his career, the com­bat­ive Farmer ran afoul of the legal estab­lish­ment one time too many. He was dis­barred in November 2019 for what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution described as ​“scorched-earth lit­i­ga­tion” in a divorce and child custody case.