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

Alabama Prisoner’s Freedom Petition Faces New Hurdle After Original Defense Lawyer’s Klan Ties Surface

Goldlaner.com – From a recreation yard at St. Clair Correctional Facility, roughly 30 miles northeast of Birmingham, a man in a khaki jumpsuit picked up the phone and spoke with the raw urgency of someone who has waited three decades for a single conversation. Robin “Rocky” Myers, a Black man who has spent 31 years confined to a single cell, told his family he no longer wants to live inside walls.

“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. “I want to be free.”

Myers’ longing for ordinary mobility underscores the gravity of what is now unfolding in Morgan County courts. His attorneys are pursuing a petition to overturn a 1994 murder conviction that sent him to Alabama’s death row. The case has drawn renewed attention after revelations that the lawyer originally appointed to defend him had spent the preceding decade representing the Ku Klux Klan in major civil litigation.

The Conviction and Its Fragments

Myers was convicted of killing his White neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker, who was found stabbed in the heart. Court documents show no DNA evidence connected him to the scene. His conviction rested on circumstantial proof and witness testimony that his current legal team characterizes as unreliable — testimony that included at least one witness who later recanted what he had said under oath. A jury composed almost entirely of White members recommended a sentence of life without parole. The presiding judge overrode that recommendation and imposed the death penalty instead.

For more than three decades, Myers sat on death row as a father of four, watching his children grow up without him. In 2025, with an execution date drawing near, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey — a Republican who has publicly championed capital punishment — intervened. She commuted the sentence to life without parole, explaining that sufficient uncertainty surrounded the question of Myers’ guilt to make proceeding with an execution untenable.

Clemency, however, did not resolve the deeper question: whether the state would continue to hold a man in prison for a crime he has consistently maintained he did not commit. That question now sits before a judge in Morgan County, where the petition to vacate the conviction awaits a ruling.

A Setback in the Petition

On Monday evening, the Morgan County District Attorney filed a brief on the state’s behalf opposing the petition. Had the prosecutor’s office agreed with the arguments Myers’ team advanced, the move would have materially strengthened his position. Instead, the matter now rests solely with the judge, and the dream of reuniting with his family remains on hold.

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

The Klan Connection

The thread that links Myers’ case to the broader history of racial injustice in Alabama runs through one name: John Edmond Mays. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mays publicly represented the United Klans of America in court, defending the organization in litigation arising from acts of racial violence. By 1992, he had been appointed by the Circuit Court of Morgan County to serve as Myers’ defense attorney.

The most consequential of those earlier cases involved the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a Black teenager in Mobile, Alabama. Donald was kidnapped, beaten, and killed by klansmen. His body was discovered hanging from a tree. The killing was carried out in retaliation for the death of a police officer — a crime in which Donald had no involvement — and to intimidate Black jurors from serving on panels that might rule in favor of Black defendants. In 1987, a jury ordered the United Klans of America to pay $7 million to Donald’s family.

Mays defended the Klan in that trial. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of the attorneys who represented Donald’s family, confirmed Mays’ role. In court, Mays described Donald’s murder as a “gross and horrible atrocity” while arguing the organization itself should not bear financial responsibility, language captured in a 1987 article in The Buffalo News. Robert Shelton, the imperial wizard — the highest-ranking officer — of the United Klans of America, told the jury:

“White supremacy is a political goal, nothing more.”

Five years later, the same attorney who had argued that point stood in a Morgan County courtroom representing a Black man accused of murder.

What Mays Says

Mays declined to speak directly with reporters. A friend and fellow attorney, Richard Jaffe, who said he has Mays’ permission to relay his remarks, passed along a statement:

“I took Rocky’s case because I hate the death penalty and I felt I could provide him with effective representation.”

Jaffe believes Mays’ prior work for the Klan raises questions about the quality and independence of the representation Myers received during the most critical phase of his life. Whether a judge will find those questions sufficient to disturb a conviction that has endured for more than thirty years remains the central question in a case that touches on Alabama’s unfinished reckoning with its segregated past.

The broader implication extends beyond one man’s freedom. If the petition succeeds, it would represent a rare instance of Alabama vacating a capital-era murder conviction on grounds tied to systemic bias in the appointment of counsel. If it fails, Myers remains in the prison yard at St. Clair, looking toward a road he has not driven in over three decades, waiting for a judge to decide whether the state’s interest in finality outweighs a man’s claim that he was never guilty.