A Black man once sentenced to death for murder fights for freedom after discovering his attorney defended the Ku Klux Klan

Alabama’s Death-Row Case Resurfaces as a Decade-Old Question About Legal Representation Meets a New Legal Deadline

Sandego.net – By Tuesday, a district attorney in Alabama must render a decision that could determine whether a man who has spent more than three decades behind bars ever walks free. The case belongs to Robin “Rocky” Myers, a Black father of four convicted in 1994 of murdering his White neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker. Myers has maintained his innocence throughout, and his current legal team now argues that fresh material emerging from the file may finally tip the scales toward exoneration. Yet the most unsettling thread in the story is not the original trial evidence — it is the identity of the attorney who stood beside him when the state sought his life.

The Conviction and Its Fragments

Court documents show that no DNA evidence connected Myers to the scene where Tucker was stabbed in the heart. His conviction rested on circumstantial proof and witness testimony that his present lawyers describe as unreliable; at least one witness later recanted what he had said under oath. A jury that was nearly all White recommended a sentence of life without parole. The presiding judge overrode that recommendation and imposed the death penalty instead.

For thirty-one years, Myers sat on Alabama’s death row. In 2025, with an execution date drawing near, Governor Kay Ivey — a Republican who has long championed capital punishment — intervened. She commuted the sentence to life without parole, explaining that the uncertainty surrounding Myers’ guilt was sufficient to prevent her from authorizing the execution. The clemency spared his life but left unanswered a far larger question: whether the state was prepared to keep a man imprisoned for a crime he says he never committed.

The Attorney Who Defended the Klan

The revelation that has electrified Myers’ current team concerns John Edmond Mays, the lawyer appointed by the Circuit Court of Morgan County to represent Myers in 1992. Mays had spent the preceding decades publicly defending the Ku Klux Klan in litigation, representing the organization in courtrooms across the South during the 1970s and 1980s. At the time of Myers’ trial, America remained only a generation removed from the formal dismantling of Jim Crow. Segregation’s aftereffects still shaped daily life in Alabama, and the Klan, though diminished from its earlier grip on local politics, continued to rally, preach racial hatred, and litigate.

The most consequential of those Klan cases involved the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a Black teenager whose body was discovered hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama. Donald had been kidnapped, beaten, and killed by klansmen in retaliation for the killing of a police officer — a killing in which Donald had no involvement — and to intimidate Black jurors from rendering verdicts favorable to Black defendants. In 1987, a court ordered the United Klans of America to pay seven million dollars in damages. Mays defended the organization in that litigation. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of the attorneys who represented Donald’s family, confirmed Mays’ role in the case.

In the courtroom, Mays described Donald’s murder as a “gross and horrible atrocity” while arguing that the organization itself should not bear liability, language captured in a 1987 article in The Buffalo News. Robert Shelton, the United Klans of America’s imperial wizard and highest-ranking leader, told the jury: “White supremacy is a political goal, nothing more.”

Five Years Later, the Same Lawyer Stood for Myers

In 1992, Mays was appointed to defend Myers. He declined to speak directly to reporters about the overlap, but a friend and fellow attorney, Richard Jaffe, relayed a written statement. Through Jaffe, Mays said: “I took Rocky’s case because I hate the death penalty and I felt I could provide him with effective representation.” Jaffe, who says he has Mays’ permission to discuss the matter publicly, maintains that the earlier Klan work does not diminish what he characterizes as the “effective and passionate” advocacy Mays provided for Myers and other Black clients throughout a career that continues to this day. He acknowledges, however, that the association was unpopular among peers at the time.

Myers’ son, LeAndrew Hood, offered a starker assessment. “He had a lawyer that didn’t care about him,” Hood said.

A Voice from the Recreation Yard

On a recent afternoon, a phone line rang and an automated message recited in a flat, mechanical tone: “You are receiving a call from the St. Clair Correctional Facility. To accept this call, press 5. This call will be recorded and subject to monitoring at any time.” The line clicked, and a new voice filled the receiver. Myers, dressed in a khaki jumpsuit, was calling from the recreation yard of the prison roughly thirty miles northeast of Birmingham. For a few minutes, the institution seemed to recede behind his words. He had spent the afternoon outside and wished he never had to go back in.

“I’ve been locked up in one cell for 31 years. I don’t want to be inside no more. When I get out, I don’t want a house. I don’t want an apartment. I want a car where I can drive everywhere,” he said, with the certainty of someone who has spent too long dreaming about something most people take for granted. “I want to be free.”

That desire now hangs on a procedural decision due within days. Whether the district attorney acts to reopen the case, and whether the newly surfaced material about the original representation alters the legal landscape, will determine whether Myers’ decades of waiting end in a courtroom or continue in a cell. The question Alabama must answer is no longer whether a man should die for a crime he denies committing. It is whether the system that convicted him can be trusted to set him right.