Blood Echoes by Thomas H. Cook

Author:Thomas H. Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

By the end of May, Judge Walter Geer—the special prosecutor’s uncle, a kinship defense attorneys would raise many times in the coming years—had appointed eight lawyers to defend the four defendants in four entirely separate trials.

As already noted, however, within days of their appointments, shifts began occurring within the shaky ranks of the defense. Most notably, Bobby Lee Hill and Fletcher Farrington of Savannah took over the defense of Carl Isaacs in a move that Isaacs heartily approved. In the first of what would become many public pronouncements, Carl declared that he was aware that “Bobby L. Hill was on the counsel that overturned Georgia’s last death penalty law.” Because of that, Carl went on, “I know that these men are irrevocably, unalterably opposed to the death penalty, and that they will do everything within their talents and abilities to help me.”

He was right. Bobby Lee Hill had for many years worked tirelessly to rid the state of Georgia of what he considered the unspeakable barbarity of capital punishment. For Hill, the heinousness of the Alday murders was not in question. In a sense, that very heinousness made his defense of Carl Isaacs even more critical. For surely if any crime deserved the imposition of the death penalty, it was the series of outrages that had occurred in and around River Road on May 14. But for Hill, that was just the point. Capital punishment was never appropriate, no matter what the crime. It was itself a form of murder, and simply because it was imposed upon those who had, themselves, committed murder, made it no more justifiable than the original offense.

Thus, for Hill, Carl Isaacs was the perfect candidate to test Georgia’s new death penalty statute. As a court case it could serve to topple the new law from the lofty perch upon which the state legislature had placed it only a few months before, and he fully intended to use it to do just that.

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