View of Bobby DeLaughter’s plight from “across the pond”

Bobby DeLaughter faces jail over patronage claim

DeLaughter (pronounced dee-lawter) broke ranks with the white establishment when, as a young prosecutor in 1994, he went back to the unresolved killing of local civil rights leader Medgar Evers 30 years earlier, and jailed the notorious veteran of the Ku Klux Klan whose guilt had been known all along.

Now DeLaughter, who rose to become a county judge, is facing jail himself – for fixing cases to advance his own ambitions towards the senior Federal Court bench. He goes on trial on April 6 on five charges of doing favours in return for influence within the Mississippi bar.

After the spectacular start to his career – his role in the Evers drama earned him a portrayal by Alec Baldwin in the Hollywood film Ghosts of Mississippi – it turns out that DeLaughter had got himself enmeshed in the devious schemes of Dickie Scruggs, the notorious ambulance-chasing lawyer, the King of Torts who earned tens of millions of dollars by suing the likes of Big Tobacco.

First Post (UK)
2/17/9