The Birmingham church bombing was part of Jones’s fabric long before he sent two of the bombers to prison. The first trial of a bomber took place in 1977. Bill Baxley, Alabama’s Attorney General, won a murder conviction of Robert Chambliss. In an eerie foreshadowing, Jones watched the trial while a law student at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and was in the courtroom when the verdict was read. He left knowing that his future “career as a lawyer would always be grounded in some way by that case.”
Jones owed his presence at the Chambliss trial to United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Jones, while a student at the University of Alabama, had the chance to meet Douglas. The aspiring trial lawyer asked the legendary jurist for career advice. Watch good lawyers ply their trade, Douglas told him. Jones did, often, he told me.
Jones left Cumberland and, in another foreshadowing, went to work for Alabama Senator Howell Heflin, whose seat Jones would later occupy. From there he embarked on a career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and then private practice.
Jones’s opportunity to finish the job that Baxley started came in 1997 when he was nominated by President Bill Clinton to serve as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. At the time, the bombing had been the subject of the office’s investigation. Jones was now in the right place, at the right time, to handle the case that he said had “influenced [his] whole life.”
“Bending Toward Justice” is the story of both Baxley’s and Jones’s prosecutions. But these were not whodunnits. The prime suspects – members of a Ku Klux Klan fringe group that advocated even more violence than the national organization -- were identified not long after the bombing, thanks to polygraph tests, witness statements and the suspects’ shaky alibis. The real stories Jones tells are why the suspects were not charged at the time and the challenges of finally prosecuting them so many years later.
Here, Jones, by examining the bombing in the context of the era, paints a picture of his segregated home state that made prosecutions not possible. In the mid-Sixties, Jones said, even with concrete evidence and multiple eyewitness accounts, “conviction of white men in the South by all-white, all-male juries was the exception rather than the rule.”
When the times were finally right to bring the cases – especially for Jones, nearly four decades later – the long delays presented huge evidentiary and other prosecution challenges. Even witnesses who had not died were, in some cases, too infirm to testify or needed medical escorts to do so. Jones lays out these prosecution difficulties in a way that both lay readers and lawyers will appreciate.
While Jones was only nine years old at the time of the church bombing, “Bending Toward Justice” is a riveting insider’s account. He tells the story as a lawyer -- focusing on such things as rules, evidence and burden of proof – as well as historian and Alabamian who is unafraid to confront the state’s ugly past.
Alabama’s junior Senator says on the last of his 350 pages that “on several occasions over the years, I wanted intensely to put the church bombing case behind me. It dominated my life and, especially in quiet moments, its ugliness was sometimes overwhelming.” Given a possible down-side of taking a legally important, but life-consuming, case, what advice would he give to a lawyer confronted with the opportunity.
“Take it. Take it,” Jones said without a moment’s hesitation. “I tell lawyers and judges all the time that I really do wish that every lawyer, every judge, but particularly lawyers, who are advocates, could have and work on a case that means so much to so many people.” It is a great opportunity, Jones explained, to have a case “that really helped society, but at the same time meant so much . . . deep down within the pit of [your] stomach or the chambers of [your] heart. [It] helps change you as a person. You look at the world differently. You look at people differently.”
Baxley paid a high price for prosecuting one of the church bombers. It has been credited for his election loss as governor of Alabama. Was Jones concerned that his own association with the case could lead to the same election result?
To the contrary, he told me that it was a strength in his campaign. “I wanted people to understand what formed me so much in who I am.” The case was, he said, consistent with his platform of “we’ve got to come together, we’ve got to treat each other with more dignity, with more respect.” In addition, “taking that case on, and knowing the challenges that we faced from a case that was decades old, the incredible challenge that we faced to try to bring that sense of justice, I think it helped me deliver a message that I’ve got both the drive and the determination to make this job what it should be and that is one of public service.” |