Freaky Friday: The Ghosts of Justice Denied

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

As the night falls and the moon rises, we’ll take a journey this week far beneath the law library into the catacombs where the bones of lesser lawyers line the walls and guttering torches light the way. That’s right, it’s time to enter the legal crypts for another monthly edition of Freaky Friday here on Lawyers & Liquor, where we talk about the morbid, morose, paranormal, or unsettling parts of the law and legal history. So settle in and sit a spell as we pull down a dusty tome of dark legal, and illegal, knowledge to drop on you. Especially this time, as we talk about the ghosts of America’s past, both figurative and literal,  of those denied justice, sentenced to death, and executed by the whims of the mob and the animus of illogical hatred.

But first, a warning:

Today’s post will contain graphic historical images and content. There is no nudity, but it will be disturbing. There will be dead people. There will be people killed for their skin color. Feel free to avoid the post this month. I’ll be back next month with another one that’s more light-hearted.

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Freaky Friday: Lawyers Are Deadly

Let’s just be honest, the law does not attract the most savory of professionals.  I mean, by and large, lawyers are learned professionals who exist to help other people with their legal problems, and do so as a manner of calling. However, we have a disproportionate number of fucking psychopaths lurking in our profession. I mean…a really fucking disproportionate number of psychopaths.  As one attorney told a researcher:

 “Deep inside me there’s a serial killer lurking somewhere. But I keep him amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty calls, and coruscating cross-examination.”

Isn’t that just comforting? Just those two sentences shatter the image of the local lawyer as being the stalwart Atticus Finch and makes them more of the Patrick Bateman type of person in your head, doesn’t it? But that’s ridiculous. One man does not a profession speak for. I mean, how many lawyers could really be off their goddamn rockers, right? It’s not like you’re going to go into your local attorney’s office and immediately get chased down the hallway by some 40-ish lawyer with a bad combover wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and wielding a motherfucking axe, right?

….Say, do you like Huey Lewis and the News?

Well let me put on this album and tell you about the blood on the hands of two particular members of our profession in this month’s Freaky Friday.

Ignore the newspapers taped to the floor.  I don’t have a dog.

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