91. Your client has autism and is charged with murder. What to do?
Lawyers know how difficult it can be to represent a client with developmental disabilities and how ill equipped our justice system is to protect them. Our guest, McCracken Poston, Jr., is a practicing criminal defense attorney and former member of the Georgia House of Representatives. He just published his new book “Zenith man: death, love and redemption in a Georgia courtroom,” the true story behind a controversial and unusual murder case.
McCracken’s client, Alvin Ridley, who suffers from autism, was charged with murdering his wife in the late 1990s, only to be found innocent thanks to overlooked, peculiar evidence and the persistent efforts of his lawyer.
Alvin was a difficult client. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation with McCracken:
“And now I'm sitting across the table from the most difficult man I've ever encountered in my life. And I can't even get him to let me in his house and I can't get him to even talk about his wife. He wants to talk about a 1977 Chevy van. And at some point in the office. He starts in on the van again, and I just, you know, in exasperation, I just said, Oh, Lord, and he went quiet and I looked across the table and he was in a childlike prayer stance.
“He had his hands class. He had his eyes closed tight. And I thought I can work with this. And so I began to pray how we needed to talk about his wife. Oh Lord, please let your child, Alvin, understand that this is something that we've got to address. And pretty much every meeting from then on, we ended in a very long instructive prayer.”
Decades later, McCracken is retelling the story as a warning about prejudice, a rush to judgment, and how Americans who are different can be swept up unfairly in our justice system.
