The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice

David Rose appeared earlier tonight on the Charlie Rose Show on PBS. He was the second half of a broadcast which involved Angelina Jolie and Daniel Pearl's widow.

Now, let's change gears.

Think of the prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse rape scandal.

Then think of the criminal prosecutorial actions depicted here.

Check here for online video:
www.charlierose.com

And here for Amazon customer book reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/Big-Eddy-Club-Stocking-Stranglings/dp/1565849108/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6498682-5066423?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182317733&sr=1-1

The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice (Hardcover)
by David Rose (Author)


Most helpful customer reviews

 
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A spellbinding investigation, May 17, 2007
By  Rowan West - See all my reviews

This is far from your typical "they got the wrong guy" story about the death penalty. Because all the biological evidence in Carleton Gary's case was destroyed (it was inexplicably deemed a "biohazard"), there is no way to prove or disprove Gary's guilt using DNA. As a result, Gary's attorneys--and Rose, as both journalist and, ultimately, paralegal on behalf of the convicted killer--have had to hunt down other evidence, from long-lost bite casts to records of tests on seminal fluids. You can't read this book without concluding that Carleton Gary got railroaded and deserves another trial. Whether he's actually innocent is a trickier question. Read the book and decide for yourself!
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
A Must Read!, May 16, 2007
By  Susan Miller (Chicago) - See all my reviews

The Big Eddy Club offers a gripping account of the systemic racism that continues to infect our criminal "justice" system. For anyone who thinks that lynching black men accused of raping white women is a thing of the past, Rose's book is a wake-up call. It demonstrates how lynching now simply takes a different form: a legal form in which black men are put on death row without a fair trial. Rose's claims are thoroughly detailed and convincingly argued, and the book is beautifully written. I recommend it unreservedly.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Is it time to abolish the death penalty?, May 4, 2007
By  Frank Johnson (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

This latest contribution by David Rose presents a troubling assessment of the relationship between race and justice in the USA. Tightly argued and well-written, it provides a gripping analysis of capital punishment. His evidence of police mismanagement of evidence and the vagaries of the trial process are, at times, breathtaking. For anyone interested in law, justice or race, this is a must-read.

Do they still have chaingangs in Georgia smashing rocks?

David Rose found a terrific candidate or two.

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Eddy-Club-Stocking-Stranglings/dp/1565849108/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-6498682-5066423?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182317733&sr=1-1

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This ineptly titled tome is an engrossing blend of true crime, legal drama and acute exposé of racial antagonism. Vanity Fair contributing editor Rose (Guantánamo: The War on Human Rights) examines the brutal rape-murders of seven older white women in Columbus, Ga., in 1977–1978. In the mid-'80s, the police charged Carlton Gary, a charismatic black ladies' man with a long rap sheet; Gary was convicted and sentenced to die. Rose (who, controversially, agreed to turn over new findings to the defense in exchange for their cooperation) presents a riveting case that Gary, still on death row, may be innocent. Police and prosecutors, he contends, may have lied to the jury and withheld possibly exculpatory evidence from Gary's attorneys, whose defense of their indigent client was hamstrung by the judge's refusal to give them funds. Later, Gary's appeals were hobbled by procedural rules; the legal "technicalities" decried on cop shows, the author argues, more often railroad than protect defendants. Rose sets the story against Columbus's history of racial oppression and biased justice, comparing Gary's prosecution to the lynchings of yesteryear. The author harps unconvincingly on the "Southern rape complex" and insinuates more than he demonstrates about the role of Columbus's Big Eddy Club of white movers and shakers. Still, Rose presents a compelling indictment of justice gone awry. Photos. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


Book Description

Race, injustice, and serial murder in the Deep South—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with an investigative edge.
"The crime happens, the mob gathers. Far too often, the question is, which nigger's neck are we going to put the noose around?"—Gary Parker, former defense lawyer for Carlton Gary

Over the course of eight bloody months in the 1970s, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven elderly white women by strangling them in their beds. In 1986, eight years after the last murder, an African American, Carlton Gary, was convicted and sentenced to death. Though many in the city doubt his guilt, he remains on death row.

Award-winning Vanity Fair reporter David Rose has followed this case for a decade in an investigation that led him to the Big Eddy Club—an all-white, members-only club in Columbus, frequented by the town's most prominent judges and lawyers...as well as most of the seven murdered women. Among Rose's discoveries was that a young black man was lynched in 1912 in Columbus after he was tried for murder and freed, and that the Columbus judge to whom the Gary case was first assigned in 1984 was the son of the mob leader in the 1912 lynching.

Framed by the tale of two lynchings—one carried out illegally at the start of the twentieth century, and the other a legal lynching carried out at the century's end—The Big Eddy Club is a gripping, revealing drama, full of evocatively drawn characters, insidious institutions, and the extraordinary connections that bind past and present. The book is also a compelling, accessible, and timely exploration of race and criminal justice, not just in the context of the South but in the entire United States, as it addresses the corruption of due process as a tool of racial oppression.

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