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Bobby DeLaughter is a hero to the veterans of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi, the Dixie slave state where getting black Americans to the voting booths could get you murdered in the 1960s.
DeLaughter (pronounced dee-lawter) broke ranks with the white establishment when, as a young prosecutor in 1994, he went back to the unresolved killing of local civil rights leader Medgar Evers 30 years earlier, and jailed the notorious veteran of the Ku Klux Klan whose guilt had been known all along.
Now DeLaughter, who rose to become a county judge, is facing jail himself - for fixing cases to advance his own ambitions towards the senior Federal Court bench. He goes on trial on April 6 on five charges of doing favours in return for influence within the Mississippi bar.
After the spectacular start to his career - his role in the Evers drama earned him a portrayal b
y Alec Baldwin in the Hollywood film Ghosts of Mississippi - it turns out that DeLaughter had got himself enmeshed in the devious schemes of Dickie Scruggs, the notorious ambulance-chasing lawyer, the King of Torts who earned tens of millions of dollars by suing the likes of Big Tobacco.
For extra humiliation, DeLaughter was fitted with slave-style leg-irons as well as handcuffs when he was formally charged before a fellow judge in Oxford, Mississippi, and released on $10,000 bail. He pleads "not guilty", but he has been fingered by Scruggs himself, who is already in jail, convicted of bribing and corruptly influencing judges.
Scruggs, 61, told prosecutors how he had tried to secure DeLaughter's promotion in return for ruling in his favour. He has already pleaded 'guilty' to his role in the affair, earning another two years on the five-year sentence handed to him last year.
It is a classic Shakespeare-on-the-bayou tale in which courageous men seek justice and redemption, only to be bro
ught down by hubris and greed, sucked back into the steamy Dixie world of back-scratching and political fixing.
Scruggs himself started out as one of the good guys, a 'contingency' lawyer suing on behalf of shipyard workers dying of asbestos poisoning. That made him his first million, but his hit against the tobacco companies in the late 1990s made a billion in fees. He was the wealthiest man in the state when he got caught bribing judges.
The killing of Megdar Evers was a stain on Mississippi that would not quite fade away. He had joined the post-war civil rights movement when, in 1946, he was kept out of the polling booth by a posse of white men.
Local Klan boss Byron De La Beckwith boasted of killing civil rights activist
He resolved to right that wrong, went to college – segregated - and became president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. He was 37 when he was assassinated outside his house in 1963 with a shot to the back of the head.
There was never
much doubt that the killer was local Klan boss Byron De La Beckwith; he boasted of it. But local police found excuses not to prosecute and when the FBI, ordered to act by Washington, put him in the dock he was twice acquitted by all-white juries.
DeLaughter was warned that he would make few friends if he rattled that skeleton - he wrote later of "hard stares, men who refused to shake my hand" - but he refused to be dissuaded. "Is it ever too late to do the right thing?" he asked the jury in his now famous 1994 summation.
Ku Klux Klan members march around Madison County Courthouse in Canton, Mississippi
DeLaughter was not interested in money, and is not accused of taking cash bribes. It was hunger for status that undid him: according to the gossip in Oxford, Mississippi, he was always motivated as much by ambition as justice.
Scruggs, on the other hand, fell to simple greed. He was cau
ght bribing judges when he was sued by fellow lawyers who claimed he had cheated them of their cut of the winnings from successful cases.
For all DeLaughter's crusading stance, he belonged to the same world as Scruggs, where scratching backs and doing clubhouse deals is simply part of the system.
There is a difference: nobody much misses Scruggs, while the lawyer who avenged a Klan killing is mourned. "I'm saddened," said Charles Evers, Megdar’s brother. "Bobby had become a member of our family."
source
DeLaughter (pronounced dee-lawter) broke ranks with the white establishment when, as a young prosecutor in 1994, he went back to the unresolved killing of local civil rights leader Medgar Evers 30 years earlier, and jailed the notorious veteran of the Ku Klux Klan whose guilt had been known all along.
Now DeLaughter, who rose to become a county judge, is facing jail himself - for fixing cases to advance his own ambitions towards the senior Federal Court bench. He goes on trial on April 6 on five charges of doing favours in return for influence within the Mississippi bar.
After the spectacular start to his career - his role in the Evers drama earned him a portrayal b
y Alec Baldwin in the Hollywood film Ghosts of Mississippi - it turns out that DeLaughter had got himself enmeshed in the devious schemes of Dickie Scruggs, the notorious ambulance-chasing lawyer, the King of Torts who earned tens of millions of dollars by suing the likes of Big Tobacco.
For extra humiliation, DeLaughter was fitted with slave-style leg-irons as well as handcuffs when he was formally charged before a fellow judge in Oxford, Mississippi, and released on $10,000 bail. He pleads "not guilty", but he has been fingered by Scruggs himself, who is already in jail, convicted of bribing and corruptly influencing judges.
Scruggs, 61, told prosecutors how he had tried to secure DeLaughter's promotion in return for ruling in his favour. He has already pleaded 'guilty' to his role in the affair, earning another two years on the five-year sentence handed to him last year.
It is a classic Shakespeare-on-the-bayou tale in which courageous men seek justice and redemption, only to be bro
ught down by hubris and greed, sucked back into the steamy Dixie world of back-scratching and political fixing.
Scruggs himself started out as one of the good guys, a 'contingency' lawyer suing on behalf of shipyard workers dying of asbestos poisoning. That made him his first million, but his hit against the tobacco companies in the late 1990s made a billion in fees. He was the wealthiest man in the state when he got caught bribing judges.
The killing of Megdar Evers was a stain on Mississippi that would not quite fade away. He had joined the post-war civil rights movement when, in 1946, he was kept out of the polling booth by a posse of white men.
Local Klan boss Byron De La Beckwith boasted of killing civil rights activist
He resolved to right that wrong, went to college – segregated - and became president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. He was 37 when he was assassinated outside his house in 1963 with a shot to the back of the head.
There was never
much doubt that the killer was local Klan boss Byron De La Beckwith; he boasted of it. But local police found excuses not to prosecute and when the FBI, ordered to act by Washington, put him in the dock he was twice acquitted by all-white juries.
DeLaughter was warned that he would make few friends if he rattled that skeleton - he wrote later of "hard stares, men who refused to shake my hand" - but he refused to be dissuaded. "Is it ever too late to do the right thing?" he asked the jury in his now famous 1994 summation.
Ku Klux Klan members march around Madison County Courthouse in Canton, Mississippi
DeLaughter was not interested in money, and is not accused of taking cash bribes. It was hunger for status that undid him: according to the gossip in Oxford, Mississippi, he was always motivated as much by ambition as justice.
Scruggs, on the other hand, fell to simple greed. He was cau
ght bribing judges when he was sued by fellow lawyers who claimed he had cheated them of their cut of the winnings from successful cases.
For all DeLaughter's crusading stance, he belonged to the same world as Scruggs, where scratching backs and doing clubhouse deals is simply part of the system.
There is a difference: nobody much misses Scruggs, while the lawyer who avenged a Klan killing is mourned. "I'm saddened," said Charles Evers, Megdar’s brother. "Bobby had become a member of our family."
source
