The last lawyer

by John Temple

This book is the story of a tireless legal Samaritan and his warfare on the injustice of capital punishment. It is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client's final sentence. Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The book chronicles Rose's decade long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones's original defense. Yet for many years, Rose's advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution. The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small