Dead at 94, GA defense lawyer Bobby Lee Cook hasn't passed into legend. He has long been one. I have watched him practice his legal craft since 1991. Here is how I described him in my book, "Secrets Never Lie." @LesterTate @PagePate @MYGACDL @StateBarofGA
From "Secrets Never Lie": "Some said that as a young lawyer, Bobby Lee Cook would stand outside the county jail on Saturday nights, shouting, "Anybody need a lawyer?" and, to those who replied in the affirmative, "What's your mama's phone number?" His temper was as legendary..
..as his legal prowess. Walker County residents said that, as a young man, Cook was a "rounder" who carried a baseball bat with him into town on Saturday nights, drawing ragged crowds who trailed him just to see who he would fight. He liked to say he was...
..."just another country lawyer," and there were those, despite official denials from Hollywood, who insisted that he was the model for Andy Griffith's milk-swilling, hot-dog eating Atlanta lawyer, "Matlock." But Cook was far more shrewd, far more cosmopolitan, than ...
...Griffith's rumpled character. He appreciated old books, fine wines, and elegant gardens. He had waltzed at presidential inaugurations and on New Year's in Vienna. For years, he chauffeured from courthouse to courthouse in a Silver Shadow Rolls Royce.
He and his wife had acquired a parrot whose large ornate cage dominated a living room lined with leather books and graced with an Italian marble fireplace he had acquired from a ruined villa. When entertaining, Cook would cheerfully bellow, "Say bye-bye, Popo,"
...at the brilliantly plumed, eccentric bird he insisted would live for decades after he and all his company had perished. His grandfatherly appearance and courtly manners initially might lull or charm witnesses, but they shed their guard at their peril. For Cook was renowned...
...as a lethal master of the art of cross-examination. "Eviscerate" was the word lawyers who had faced Cook chose to describe his way with opposing witnesses. The moral outrage implicit in perhaps his most frequently asked question -"Now, that was a lie, wasn't it?" -
...had successfully stripped away the credibility of scores of witnesses who had brokered deals with prosecutors in return for their testimony. Cook hated government informants with a singular passion he reserved for liars and traitors. They were, by their very nature...
...untrustworthy opportunists to whom truth was as irrelevant as salvation. Cook was personally offended whenever prosecutors relied on such individuals to make their case. It was an unseemly shortcut that circumvented honest investigation and implicitly violated a defendant's ..
...constitutional rights to due process and a fair trial. He went after them with a rare vengeance, evoking a similar outrage in jurors so successfully that he had won acquittals in nearly 90 percent of his cases - a formidable record.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
