Robin “Rocky” Myers was sentenced to death in 1994. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey commuted his death sentence on Friday, Feb. 28. He is seeking to have his conviction overturned and be granted a new trial. (Alabama Department of Corrections)
A Morgan County judge last month ordered the state to respond to a former death row inmate who says his court-appointed attorney was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan.
Judge Charles Elliott gave the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office’s until Aug. 25 to respond to an appeal from Robin “Rocky” Myers whose team says they have found evidence that John Mays, who represented Myers at his capital murder trial in 1994, spoke at numerous white supremacist rallies and was affiliated with the Klan Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton.
“This wasn’t just a conflict of interest; it was a total subversion of justice. The State cannot look the other way,” said JaTaune Bosby Gilchrist, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Alabama, in a statement.
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A message was sent to Mays on Monday seeking comment.
Myers was convicted of capital murder in 1994 after he allegedly stabbed his neighbor Ludie Mae Tucker in Decatur in 1991. Myers maintains he was not involved in Tucker’s death.
A message was sent to the Morgan County District Attorney’s Office on Tuesday seeking comment.
Gov. Kay Ivey in February 2025 commuted Myers’ death sentence to life in prison, saying that she had enough concerns about his guilt that she had trouble with putting him to death.
Alabama man appeals 1991 murder conviction, citing evidence of trial attorney’s ties to KKK
Myers’s legal team filed a postconviction appeal in March for a new trial after discovering news accounts documenting Mays speaking at nine Klan rallies between 1977 and 1981. According to one report, Mays used a racial epithet at one gathering in Virginia.
The Morgan County District Attorney’s Office has argued that the rules only allow Myers to file one postconviction appeal and that too much time has elapsed from the time of Ivey’s commutation to the moment that Myers filed his most recent petition seeking relief.
The District Attorney also said in the filing that Myers’ legal team should have raised the issue earlier because newspaper accounts of Mays’ actions were available long before the researchers and attorneys on his legal team found them.
J. Mitchell McGuire, an attorney representing Myers, wrote in response that Mays’ alleged conflict of interest “is not governable by ordinary preclusion rules.”
“It is a structural defect — one that, under controlling Supreme Court authority, presumptively corrupts every aspect of the proceedings in which it operates, and that renders the resulting judgment constitutionally void,” he wrote.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, who studies constitutional law, supported Myers in a declaration.
“My opinion is this: the conflict existed; it was structural rather than incidental; it arose from Mr. Mays’s personal affiliation with an organization whose defining mission was adverse to the interests, dignity, and equal humanity of his Black client; and it was of a kind the constitutional guarantee of loyal counsel exists precisely to prohibit,” he said in his declaration.
Chemerinsky wrote that kind of conflict “does not depend on a showing that the outcome would have been different; it does not depend on whether the lawyer performed competently at trial.”
Myers’ legal team also said that the clock on the time that Myers had to file an appeal began when members of his legal team could first confirm the conflict of interest with Mays; and that happened during the conversation the team had with him in July 2025 and not at the end of February when Ivey granted Myers clemency. The original petition was filed in September 2025 when his attorneys declared to the court that Myers would be filing an appeal but seeking an exemption from the fees.
McGuire also included a declaration from Edwin Bridges, who served as the director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History from 1982 to 2012.
Bridges said that the articles that related to Mays were “required almost incalculable effort to locate. Almost all were from outside Alabama. And none were not available through searchable digital archives until at least the late 2010s. They were certainly not available to a poor black man in Alabama.”
He also said people could have discovered Mays’ activities through “reasonable diligence.” One is that many people who are white “were not at the point where they appreciated in a sympathetic way the many injustices to which Black Alabamians had been subjected.”
“People who knew Mr. Mays, who had observed his activities alongside the Klan, or who had information bearing on his true relationship with the organization, were operating in a social environment in which those disclosures were neither expected nor welcomed,” Bridges said in his declaration. “Mr. Mays himself, as the record in this case demonstrates, remains even today unwilling to forthrightly acknowledge what the record shows about his relationship with the United Klans of America.”
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Ralph Chapoco