Deep Delta Justice
A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South
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3.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The book that inspired the documentary A Crime on the Bayou
2021 Chautauqua Prize Finalist
The "arresting, astonishing history" of one lawyer and his defendant who together achieved a "civil rights milestone" (Justin Driver).
In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful white supremacists in the South, a man called simply "The Judge."
In this powerful work of character-driven history, journalist Matthew Van Meter vividly brings alive how a seemingly minor incident brought massive, systemic change to the criminal justice system. Using first-person interviews, in-depth research and a deep knowledge of the law, Van Meter shows how Gary Duncan's insistence on seeking justice empowered generations of defendants-disproportionately poor and black-to demand fair trials. Duncan v. Louisiana changed American law, but first it changed the lives of those who litigated it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Van Meter's excellent debut revisits Duncan v. Louisiana, the landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision affirming that the constitutional right to a trial by jury applied to state courts. The case originated in the 1966 arrest of a 19-year-old black man for allegedly striking a white boy in Plaquemines Parish, La. Convicted of misdemeanor battery, Gary Duncan was sentenced to 60 days in prison but appealed on the basis that Louisiana's trial jury statutes violated his Sixth Amendment rights. As the appeal worked its way to the Supreme Court (where Duncan's conviction was overturned), forces aligned with local political boss Leander Perez ("the most notorious racist in the state") fought to have Duncan's attorney barred from Louisiana courtrooms for practicing law without a state license a legal strategy designed to blunt the effectiveness of civil rights lawyers across the South. Van Meter makes great use of interviews and oral histories to bring the case's major players to life, and readers will be struck by how many of the issues involved voter suppression, public funding for private schools, racial inequalities in the criminal justice system are still being legislated today. This deeply researched and vividly written chronicle is the definitive account of one of the civil rights movement's most unheralded victories.
