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Bobby DeLaughter faces jail over patronage claim

A judge who was a hero to the veterans of the civil rights struggle goes on trial accused of favours-for-influence deals

FIRST POSTED FEBRUARY 17, 2009

Bobby DeLaughter is a hero to the veterans of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi, the Dixie slave state where getting black Americans to the voting booths could get you murdered in the 1960s.

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.

Attorney Dickie Scruggs, centre, is flanked by his attorney Joey Langston and his secretary Charlene Bosarge as they leave court in Jackson, Mississippi

For extra humiliation, DeLaughter was fitted with slave-style leg-irons as well as handcuffs when he was formally charged before a fellow judge in Oxford, Mississippi, and released on $10,000 bail. He pleads "not guilty", but he has been fingered by Scruggs himself, who is already in jail, convicted of bribing and corruptly influencing judges.

Scruggs, 61, told prosecutors how he had tried to secure DeLaughter's promotion in return for ruling in his favour. He has already pleaded 'guilty' to his role in the affair, earning another two years on the five-year sentence handed to him last year.

It is a classic Shakespeare-on-the-bayou tale in which courageous men seek justice and redemption, only to be brought down