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

Thirty-One Years Behind Bars: Alabama’s Rocky Myers Seeks Freedom After His Original Defense Lawyer’s Klan Ties Surface

Activelifezero.com – The automated voice crackles through a prison phone line, its flat monotone announcing that the call originates from St. Clair Correctional Facility, roughly 30 miles northeast of Birmingham, Alabama. A click. Then a man’s voice breaks through — Robin “Rocky” Myers, clad in a khaki jumpsuit, speaking from the recreation yard where he has spent the afternoon in open air. For those few minutes, the walls of the institution seem to pull back.

“I’ve been locked up in one cell for 31 years. 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 says it with the unshakable conviction of a man who has rehearsed this fantasy for decades. Then he adds, simply: “I want to be free.”

A Conviction Built on Circumstance

Myers, a Black father of four, was handed a death sentence in 1994 for the killing of his White neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker. Court records show Tucker was stabbed in the heart. No DNA evidence connected Myers to the scene. His conviction rested on circumstantial proof and witness accounts that his current legal team describes as unreliable — accounts that included at least one witness who later withdrew his testimony under oath.

The jury, composed almost entirely of White members, recommended life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The presiding judge overrode that recommendation and imposed capital punishment instead. That single judicial decision set Myers on a path that would consume more than three decades of his life.

Clemency, Not Exoneration

For years Myers sat on Alabama’s death row. In 2025, as his scheduled execution drew near, Governor Kay Ivey intervened. Ivey, a Republican who has long championed capital punishment, commuted the sentence to life without parole, citing sufficient uncertainty about Myers’ guilt to warrant halting the execution. The move spared his life but did not answer the deeper question hanging over the case: whether the state was prepared to keep a man imprisoned for a crime he insists he never committed.

The clemency decision landed in a state still carrying the weight of its segregated past. When Myers was arrested and tried, America was barely a generation removed from the formal dismantling of Jim Crow. Segregation’s residue still shaped jury pools, courtroom dynamics, and community trust. And the Ku Klux Klan, though far diminished from its mid-century grip on Southern politics, had not vanished. It continued to organize, to preach racial animus, and to appear in courtrooms defending its members.

The Lawyer Who Defended the Klan

Among the attorneys who publicly represented the Klan in litigation during the 1970s and 1980s was John Edmond Mays. In 1987, a federal court ordered the United Klans of America to pay $7 million in damages over the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a Black teenager whose body was discovered hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama. Donald had been abducted, beaten, and killed by klansmen in retaliation for the slaying of a police officer — a killing in which he had no part — and to intimidate Black jurors from voting in favor of Black defendants.

Mays defended the Klan in that case. Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of the attorneys who represented Donald’s family, confirmed the arrangement. In the courtroom, Mays described Donald’s murder as a “gross and horrible atrocity” while arguing the organization itself should bear no liability, according to a 1987 report in The Buffalo News. Robert Shelton, the Klan’s imperial wizard and highest-ranking officer, told the jury: “White supremacy is a political goal, nothing more.”

Five years later, in 1992, Mays was appointed by the Circuit Court of Morgan County to represent Rocky Myers in his capital trial. The connection between the man who had defended the Klan’s most notorious murder case and the Black defendant facing execution has now become central to Myers’ bid for a new trial.

A Petition, and a Setback

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

Mays declined to comment directly but, through a friend and fellow attorney named Richard Jaffe, conveyed a statement explaining his choice of representation: “I took Rocky’s case because I hate the death penalty and I felt I could provide him with effective representation.” Jaffe said he had Mays’ permission to relay the remarks.

Myers’ current legal team has petitioned the court to overturn the 1994 conviction, arguing that the original appointment of a lawyer with deep ties to the Klan — and that the quality of representation that followed — warrants a fresh look at the case. On Monday evening, however, the Morgan County District Attorney filed a brief on the state’s behalf opposing the petition. Had the prosecutor’s office sided with Myers, the move would have substantially bolstered his position. Now the matter rests with a judge’s ruling.

The setback leaves Myers’ dream of reuniting with his four children — and of driving a car down an open road — suspended once again. He remains at St. Clair Correctional Facility, serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he has denied for more than three decades. The question of whether Alabama will revisit that conviction, and whether the circumstances of his original defense will factor into any judicial determination, remains unresolved.