In 1951, Cook represented a man who had been arrested for moonshining by a Georgia sheriff who didn’t appreciate Cook’s belief that the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal searches and seizures should apply in Georgia. When Cook showed up at the jail to post bail for his client, the sheriff refused to accept the money and threatened to kill the defense lawyer if he made any further attempts to have his client freed.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” Cook told the sheriff. “There are hundreds of Cooks who live in this county and they will hunt you down like a damn rabbit, and they will kill you.”
Cook says he put the money on the table, grabbed the keys to the jail cell and started to walk his client out the door, when he heard the sheriff cock his pistol.
“Boom! The gun fires and the bullet shoots into the doorway just above my head,” says Cook. “I got my client the hell out of there.”
A month later, at his client’s trial, Cook got his revenge. He had the sheriff on cross-examination and asked why he hadn’t also arrested his client’s neighbors for moonshining. When the sheriff didn’t answer, Cook responded it was because the neighbors had been making secret payments to the sheriff while his client had not. Angered, the sheriff threw a Coke bottle at Cook, barely missing him.
“I walked up to the witness stand, grabbed the sheriff by the collar, pulled him down onto the floor and started whipping up on him,” says Cook. “The judge was on the bench and the jury was in the box watching me whip up on him for several minutes. They all knew the sheriff was a tyrant. After a few minutes, the judge cleared his throat and said, ‘Mr. Cook, I think he’s had enough.’
“I pushed the sheriff back into the witness chair and finished my cross-examination,” says Cook. “Damn jury was out for only a few minutes before they came back with a not guilty verdict on all counts.”
Bobby Lee Cook, ABA Journal
Topic: Iz stampe (Read 1044960 times)
