Richard Jaffe’s explosive second edition of Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned affirms the vital role criminal defense lawyers play in the balance between life and death, liberty and lockup. It is a compelling journey into the legal and human drama of life or death criminal cases that often reads more like hard to imagine fiction, yet these cases are real. Quest for Justice invites readers into the courtroom and into the field with Richard Jaffe, a powerhouse Alabama defense attorney with more than four decades of experience, who has successfully defended hundreds of individuals accused of murder, including more than seventy cases where the defendant faced the death penalty, including the Olympic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, in Alabama, nine people have been exonerated from death row—Jaffe represented four of them: James Willie “Bo” Cochran, Randal Padgett, Gary Drinkard, and Wesley Quick. Though every chapter reveals more alarming, gut-wrenching cases, and impediments to justice, Jaffe’s unwavering determination, hope, and strategies in the courtroom yield many momentous victories for his clients and the cause of justice. In Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned, Richard Jaffe offers all audiences an accessible, page-turning perspective borne out of a life representing the damned in America’s criminal justice system.

Why You Should Read It

“Richard Jaffe has been on the frontlines navigating difficult legal terrain for decades. This book offers a critically important eyewitness account of what it means to fight for justice on behalf of the disfavored and accused. Critical reading for anyone who wants to ‘walk the walk.’”

- Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and Author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned (2nd Ed.) Preface

Since 2012, the publication date of the first edition of Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned, seismic changes have occurred regarding the death penalty and the criminal justice system in the U.S. Then, the Death Penalty Information Center documented 138 exonerations from death row. Now there are 167, as well as numerous other documented wrongful convictions. In 2012, I predicted that in my lifetime we would abolish the death penalty and join every other country in the industrialized West. I continue to predict it.

Several more states have instituted moratoriums or abolished the death penalty. Others are in the process. Both death verdicts and executions have significantly diminished. Public opinion has begun to shift toward abolition, and many in power now seriously question its efficacy and costs, in financial and human terms. No one credibly believes it results in deterrence. Society and the courts more readily acknowledge the pervasive discriminatory influences of race and class and the troubling realities of ineffective assistance of counsel claims, which result in high reversals, new trials, wrongful convictions, and hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted resources. It is now widely accepted that in America it is “better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent.” Courts have also recognized the fallacy of cross-racial identifications, scientific advancements in forensic evidence, and in some cases, bias in crime labs. And finally, the deep thirst for criminal justice reform became the most significant bipartisan action of Congress in recent years.

In this second edition of Quest, I write about all these changes, and more, from my own experiences since 2012, as well as other cases familiar to me and leaders in the criminal justice arena. I tell the stories of other cases I have handled since 2012 that include “The Outrageous Conviction of Montez Spradley” (as characterized by the Washington Post), a Miller case I worked on for thirty-five years, and a “Stand your Ground” case riddled with racial influences. In addition, I update the lives of three of the death row exonerees I represented. I also address “Racial Realities” head on and include reflections on 42 years of intimately interacting within the criminal justice system, as well as powerful hard to imagine stories of forgiveness and redemption that demonstrate breathless profiles of courage.

It is my fervent hope and belief that this second edition of Quest will be utilized in more law schools and colleges, serve to add even more to the debates and conversations in the criminal justice and death penalty areas, and inspire even more lawyers and law students to become “Liberty’s Last Champions,” the words and actions of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

© 2020, Richard S. Jaffe, All Rights Reserved.

Quest for Justice: Defending the Damned (2nd Ed.) Prologue

One bleak November night, a lone man pointed a gun at a young female cashier and demanded money at a grocery store in Homewood, Alabama, a suburb that stands on the edge of both Birmingham and the affluent town of Mountain Brook. After the cashier doled out a few hundred dollars in rolled cash and coins, the robber left. Shaken, the cashier called 911, reporting the armed robbery.

The 911 operator alerted the police departments of Homewood, Mountain Brook, and Birmingham. Officers from all three jurisdictions quickly responded, but before they could apprehend the robber, violence erupted.

The twenty-three-year-old store manager followed the robber out of the grocery store. The unarmed manager and the robber played a dangerous game of “cat and mouse” for two or three minutes. As the robber started to cross the street, the store manager came closer to him. The robber turned and pointed his gun at the store manager, who retreated toward the store entrance. Then the store manager retraced his pursuit. The robber again turned and pointed his gun. The young manager again retreated. Finally, they both disappeared deep in a dark trailer park across the street. They were out of sight of both the cashier and a customer who had witnessed the alarming scene through the store’s plate glass windows.

Within five minutes of the cashier’s call to 911, two Homewood plainclothes police officers arrived on the scene. After speaking to the cashier, they approached and entered the trailer park. Three confused students walked out on the front porch of their trailer after hearing “Halt! Police!” and two gunshots. The officers ordered them to go back inside, close the door and remain there until further notice. Several other residents later reported they also heard the sounds of two rapidly fired gunshots. For some unknown reason, the plainclothes police officers raced away from the trailer park after the shots were fired.

Additional police officers who had arrived at the grocery store converged on the darkened trailer park. No more than thirty minutes after the trailer residents heard the gunshots, a group of three officers searching for the robber found Bo Cochran hiding in thick brush just outside the trailer park, approximately one-quarter mile from the scene of the shooting. The police located a .38 revolver in the bushes about ten feet from Bo. Officers noticed that the worn weapon appeared rusty and brown, with a scratched four-inch barrel. When an officer examined the weapon, he discovered that the cylinder contained four rounds and turned clockwise. He further noted and later put in his report that from the position of the cylinder, the weapon’s most recent turn would not have discharged a bullet, because it was empty. The last time someone pulled the trigger, the gun did not fire. Trailer residents had reported gunshots, but when the officers came upon Bo Cochran and his gun, they discovered the weapon was cold and without the scent of burned gun powder. The officers did not conduct a Paraffin test, then a standard technique, to determine the probability of whether a person had recently handled or fired the gun. One of the three officers conducting the search put a gun to Bo’s head and said, “I ought to put a bullet right through your head.”

With his heart pounding, Bo was curled up in a fetal position among the dark weeds and grassy woods. The officers immediately cuffed and thoroughly searched him, finding nothing of interest and no money of any kind. Before placing him in a nearby squad car, two other officers searched Bo, again finding nothing.

It wasn’t until forty-five minutes after the reported gunshots that, after an intense search, numerous officers discovered the store manager’s lifeless corpse under the trailer shared by the three students. The body was still warm. About an hour after the students heard the shots, officers went inside their trailer and took their statements.

When the coroner arrived at the scene, he examined the dead store manager’s body. He discovered that one penetrating gunshot to the manager’s left arm travelled through his side, perforated his heart and caused his death. The bullet then lodged in his right arm. This was extremely significant, because the bullet had not passed through his right arm; there was no exit wound. The coroner never found the bullet, nor did a search party of police officers who searched both that night and over the next several days using a metal detector. However, the coroner did find a rather large scraping mark at the site of the entrance wound in the manager’s right arm, as if someone had used a pocket knife to remove the bullet.

Crime scene photos revealed no signs of blood on the grass or grass marks on the store manager’s clothes. It seemed that at least two people must have lifted the young man’s body and placed it underneath the trailer.

At the police station, the booking officers searched Bo for a third time. This time, they claimed to find a wad of money in a jacket pocket that already had been searched twice. The money matched that found in a grocery sack in the trailer park by another group of officers who had been conducting a search for shell casings, bullets and any other potential evidence.

When the officers “discovered” the rolled money in Bo’s jacket, Bo yelled out, “You planted that money on me! You planted it! You already searched me twice. You planted it!”

The officers responded by booking Bo for capital murder.

© 2020, Richard S. Jaffe, All Rights Reserved.