WVU professor writes about lawyers who try to save death row inmates
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John Temple is the print journalism program chair and the associate dean of the School of Journalism at WVU. |
November 17, 2009 ·
Author John Temple tracked the case of a North Carolina man who was exonerated from death row in 2008.
The book follows the case of Bo Jones. Jones was convicted of a murder that happened in rural North Carolina in 1987.
Jones is mentally handicapped. He appealed his conviction, saying he was innocent, and that he had poor legal representation at the murder trial.
He lost those appeals.
But in 1997, a lawyer named Ken Rose took interest in Jones’ case.
After more than a decade of investigating, Rose helped Jones get exonerated from prison last year.
John Temple is a WVU journalism professor and author of “The Last Lawyer: The Fight to Save Death Row Inmates.”
Temple carefully tracked the Bo Jones case through the work of Jones’ attorney Ken Rose.
Rose built the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina. He formed a massive investigation into Jones’ case.
“He had never run into a case that had so many different problems with it,” Temple said.
Temple made several trips to North Carolina during the writing process.
He says it was difficult to meet Jones and gain his trust.
“He was very suspicious of me,” Temple said, “but when he was released, I did interview him a couple times.”
Temple says he faced some difficult challenges when trying to write the book.
He says he had to make some compromises to get the information he needed.
“These cases can go on for decades, and sometimes they can go into sort of a limbo,” Temple said.
“The Last Lawyer” is Temple’s second book.
He wrote “Deadhouse: Life in a Coroner’s Office,” which was published in 2007.