A Black man once sentenced to death for murder fights for freedom after discovering his attorney defended the Ku Klux Klan

By Alaa Elassar, CNN

(CNN) — A phone line rings. It clicks, and an automated message is recited in a woman’s strict, dull monotone.

“You are receiving a call from the St. Clair Correctional Facility. To accept this call, press 5. This call will be recorded and subject to monitoring at any time.”

The line clicks again and a new voice floods into the receiver.

Robin “Rocky” Myers, dressed in a khaki jumpsuit, is calling from the recreation yard of an Alabama prison about 30 miles northeast of Birmingham. For a few minutes, the prison seems to recede behind his voice.

He has spent the afternoon outside and wishes he never had to go back in.

“I’ve been locked up in one cell for 31 years. I don’t want to be inside no more. When I get out, I don’t want a house. I don’t want an apartment. I want a car where I can drive everywhere,” he said, with the certainty of someone who has spent too long dreaming about something most people take for granted.

“I want to be free.”

Myers, a Black man, was sentenced to death in 1994 for the murder of his White neighbor, Ludie Mae Tucker, a crime he maintains he did not commit. There was no DNA evidence tying him to the crime scene, where Tucker had been stabbed in the heart, according to court documents.

His conviction rested on circumstantial evidence and testimony from witnesses Myers’ lawyers said were unreliable, including one witness who later recanted his testimony. A nearly all-White jury recommended life without parole, but the judge overrode them and imposed a death sentence.

The attorneys now representing Myers are hoping new information about the lawyer originally appointed to defend him may finally bring the freedom he has spent decades fighting for.

“He had a lawyer that didn’t care about him,” LeAndrew Hood, Myers’ son, told CNN.

But on Monday evening, that hope dimmed slightly when the Morgan County District Attorney filed a brief on behalf of the state opposing Myers’ petition to overturn his conviction. Agreeing with Myers’ petition would likely have strengthened his case, but the matter now rests with a judge. The setback has left Myers’ dream of reuniting with his family on hold, at least for now.

For years, Myers, a father of four, sat on death row. Then, in 2025, with his execution approaching, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey granted him clemency, commuting his death sentence to life without parole. Ivey, a Republican who is a staunch supporter of the death penalty, said because there was enough uncertainty surrounding Myers’ guilt, she could not allow the execution to go forward.

But clemency did not answer a larger question: Is Alabama prepared to let a man die in prison for a crime he maintains he did not commit?

Justice in the shadow of Jim Crow

When Myers was arrested and tried, America was only a generation removed from the formal end of Jim Crow. The ghosts of segregation still walked the streets. And the Ku Klux Klan, though diminished from its earlier power, had not disappeared. It was still rallying, preaching racial hatred.

Among the men who publicly defended the klan, representing them in court cases in the 1970s and ’80s, was an attorney named John Edmond Mays.

In 1987, the United Klans of America was ordered to pay $7 million for the gruesome 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a Black teenager whose body was found hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama. Donald had been kidnapped, beaten and killed by klansmen in retaliation for the killing of a police officer – a crime Donald had no involvement in – and to intimidate Black jurors from ruling in favor of Black defendants.

Mays defended the Klan in the case, according to Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and one of the lawyers who represented Donald’s family.

In court, Mays called Donald’s murder a “gross and horrible atrocity” but argued the organization itself should not be held responsible, according to a 1987 article in The Buffalo News. Robert Shelton, who was the United Klans of America’s imperial wizard, the highest-ranking leader, told the jury, “White supremacy is a political goal, nothing more.”

Then, in 1992, Mays became Myers’ lawyer.

Mays declined to speak to CNN but a friend and fellow lawyer, Richard Jaffe, passed along a statement from him.

“I took Rocky’s case because I hate the death penalty and I felt I could provide him with effective representation,” Mays told CNN, through Jaffe. He was appointed by the Circuit Court of Morgan County to represent Myers.

Jaffe, who said he has Mays’ permission to speak with CNN, believes Mays’ previous representation of the klan does not diminish the “effective and passionate” advocacy he provided for Myers or other Black clients he has represented throughout his career, which continues today.

“It was not a popular thing for him to do in that small town. Think ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’” Jaffe told CNN, referring to Harper Lee’s novel about a Black man falsely accused of raping a White woman in the Jim Crow South and who was defended by a White man. “Rocky deserves a new trial, but not because of John,” he later added.

For decades, activists and Myers’ legal team have dug through the wreckage of his case. What they found was not one isolated mistake but a trail of failures, including his representation, according to Kacey Keeton, one of Myers’ attorneys in his federal habeas proceedings.

“A Black person on trial for their life would not make that choice for that to be their lawyer,” Keeton, who represented Myers from 2007 to 2025, when he was granted clemency, said. “When you are poor and Black in Alabama, you get what the state gives you. And that’s what they gave Rocky Myers.”

Attorney represented klan in court and attended KKK rally

Jaffe told CNN Mays denies being a klansman. Jaffe said Mays was just a lawyer representing the klan.

While Mays defended the klan in court on multiple occasions, Myers’ lawyers argue his involvement went beyond his role as an attorney, citing archived newspaper reports and photographs they say portray Mays as an outspoken public defender of the klan.

“You hear a lot about civil rights of the (N-word) and the civil rights of murderers and of every kind of pervert known to humanity,” Mays is quoted as saying during a 1977 Klan rally in Virginia, according to the Suffolk-News Herald. “But what about the civil rights of the decent, law-abiding White man, or the law-abiding Black man, for the matter?”

Asked about the newspaper report, Jaffe said Mays helped klan leader Shelton get a permit for the rally and regrets attending it.

Mays also expressed regret for using the N-word, attributing it to growing up in “a racist environment” in the segregated South, Jaffe said.

“If John represented someone from the klan, it doesn’t make him racist,” Jaffe told CNN.

Myers’ lawyers see something more troubling, arguing Mays’ history followed him into Myers’ trial and compromised the defense of a Black man whose life depended on him.

Fighting for another chance in court

In August 2025, after Myers was granted clemency, his attorneys jumped at what they perceived to be an opening. They filed a petition asking a judge to vacate his conviction, arguing Myers is innocent, and the failures surrounding his original defense make his conviction fundamentally unreliable.

The Morgan County District Attorney’s Office, representing the State of Alabama, opposed the petition in March 2026. Myers’ lawyers filed a reply in May.

The District Attorney on Monday evening filed its answer, once again opposing Myers’ petition and adopting its prior arguments in its motion to dismiss.

The state argued that Myers is trying to revive his untimely claim of ineffective assistance of counsel by repackaging it as a conflict-of-interest argument, but has failed to meet the heavy burden of showing that the prior Klan case actually conflicts with his own.

The District Attorney’s decision does not necessarily mean Myers will never walk free. A Morgan County Circuit Court judge must now decide whether to set an evidentiary hearing or dismiss the petition without a hearing.

“If the hearing occurs, Myers will be able to put on evidence that his attorney, John Mays, was conflicted to the point of not providing representation and evidence of innocence and lying witnesses,” Keeton told CNN. “During such a hearing, the district attorney decides how much to fight versus agree with what Rocky presents.”

The judge will then decide whether Myers met his burden of showing his conviction should be overturned. If he rules in favor of Myers’ petition, the district attorney will decide whether to appeal or to retry Myers. If not, Myers’ team will appeal.

This is the question now hanging over Myers’ case: In a conviction built on disputed testimony and a defense led by someone who spent a decade representing an organization that viewed people like you as less than human, was your trial fair?

A judge will now have the final say, but there is no clear timeline for when a decision, or the next word in Myers’ quest for freedom, will come.

Weighing the evidence in a new light

The evidence at the heart of Myers’ conviction, his lawyers say, is just as troubling as the representation surrounding his case and raises questions of its own.

Before succumbing to her injuries on October 4, 1991, the victim described her attacker as a stocky, short Black man — a description Myers’ attorneys argue points to his innocence; he was her neighbor and frequently visited her to buy ice. If Myers had been her attacker, they contend, she could have identified him by name or simply said it was her neighbor.

Investigators initially suspected Anthony “Cool Breeze” Ballentine after a VCR was stolen from victim Ludie Mae Tucker’s home. Three witnesses said they saw Ballentine with the VCR at a neighborhood drug house, where he allegedly traded it for crack cocaine. Police arrested him.

But then, witnesses began implicating Myers instead. A later November 30 police report said Ballentine was released “on a joint recommendation” by the police department and district attorney’s office because “new evidence” suggested the witnesses lied about Ballentine selling the VCR. Now Myers, newly identified as the person who brought the VCR to the drug house, was the suspect.

The VCR used against Myers was eventually identified as Tucker’s through the serial number and was never tied to Myers by fingerprints or other forensic evidence. The petition for a new trial argues the original accounts were more consistent with the evidence. One witness said Ballentine was wearing a bloodstained white shirt, according to the initial October 18 police report. CNN was unable to reach Ballentine for comment.

In 2004, one of the witnesses, Marzell Ewing, wrote a declaration for the courts on behalf of Myers, saying he lied in his trial testimony because of pressure and he did not see who brought the VCR.

One of the jurors who sat through his trial, Mae Puckett, wrote a letter in 2011, urging Alabama to spare Myers’ life.

“Mr. Myers’ son testified and basically begged us to spare his father’s life,” she wrote. “That is a part of the trial that I wish I could forget.”

Puckett, one of the 11 White jurors, could not forget how deeply “unfair” the trial felt.

“I do not want to sit in silence while someone I believe to be innocent is executed,” Puckett wrote.

Even Mays maintains he is innocent, Jaffe emphasized.

“People on crack testified for the state, and when they testified for the state, they lied, and that’s what the jury chose to believe,” Jaffe told CNN.

Myers also has an intellectual disability, an issue Miriam Bankston, the chief investigator on Myers’ legal team, said affected how he interacted with police and his attorneys. Yet after his conviction, the lawyer appointed to handle his appeal abandoned the case entirely, filing nothing, she added.

Myers missed his chance to have claims of innocence and other constitutional issues heard in court, according to the state. Eventually, a letter arrived telling him he had missed multiple state and federal court deadlines — a letter his lawyers said he could not read himself.

Despite the jury recommending life without parole, the judge went against their wishes and imposed a state execution. Alabama has since abolished judicial override, the practice that allowed judges to order the state to kill a person even though a jury of one’s peers requested otherwise.

Myers’ lawyers argue his own defense attorney helped turn the jury against him. In his opening statement, Mays described Myers’ neighborhood as “the very pit of hell” and told jurors, “You’re people who are not used to being around criminals. You’re people who are not used to being around crackheads.”

“He was just up there calling him a crackhead, calling him a no-good, wasn’t good for society,” Hood said. “Like he didn’t have a mother that loved him, or kids, or a wife. He was just up there talking about him like he was nothing.”

When asked about Mays’ use of that language to describe Myers during the trial, Jaffe pointed instead to the outcome Mays secured: “How did he get a life verdict in a place where a Black man stabbed a White woman? I know that the performance he did (got) a life verdict for Rocky, who was innocent, in spite of the fact that crackheads lied.”

The petition argues Mays’ language during the trial revealed something deeper than a poor defense strategy — a worldview that dehumanized the man he was supposed to defend.

“Mr. Myers was a family man who lived with his wife and children,” Mitchell McGuire, Myers’ current attorney, wrote in the petition. “Yes, they were poor. And, yes, Mr. Myers struggled with addiction issues. But they were good, decent people, just not White.”

The state, he argued, was asking the court to dismiss the history of Mays’ klan advocacy as nothing more than “stale newspaper gossip,” even though the history goes directly to the question of whether Myers received a fair defense at the most consequential proceeding of his life, McGuire wrote in his response.

While the state’s decision is another setback in a legal fight that has stretched across more than 30 years, the fight for Myers and his family is not over yet.

A family wants their father back

Myers’ case has haunted many. Perhaps none more than Hood, who was 12 when he testified for his father.

He told the judge he was lying in bed with his dad watching a New York Giants game while his three siblings were coloring and playing with toys when ambulance lights flashed across their window. “Son, what’s going (on) out there don’t have nothing to do with us,” Hood told CNN, recalling his father soothing him.

For three decades, Hood has waited for his father to come home. He still mourns what he lost but tries to swallow the anger and grief to make space in his heart for the seed of hope to bloom.

He is 47 now, with a son of his own, but he still calls Rocky “Daddy.”

“My father really shouldn’t be in there,” Hood said. “They don’t have no evidence on him at all.” He speaks of feeling betrayed by his country and government and wants the case back in court, believing everything uncovered over the years could give his father the chance he never had.

Myers admits the mistakes he made before prison, including drug use, but his first day behind bars became the first day of decades of sobriety. He has learned to forgive even those he feels betrayed him, including Mays.

“It hurts he’s like that. Whatever he did to me is over with,” Myers said. “I’m not really bitter or nothing about that.” What remains is the belief that his life can still become something other than the story told about him.

“I am not who they say I am. I’m not no killer,” he continues. “When the judge sentenced me, he told me that I was a threat to society and it broke my heart. I literally cried over that.”

It is a story that sits uneasily inside the history of Alabama, a state whose past is still visible through the cracks in its institutions. By August 25, the district attorney must decide whether to seek to vacate Myers’ conviction or if the story needs to be heard by a jury again.

The prison gives Myers and Hood only 15 minutes at a time to talk. They fill them with ordinary things — Giants, the Yankees, news about Myers’ grandchildren. Once, Myers celebrated a Knicks win from one side of the prison wall while Hood cheered from the other. For a moment, they were simply father and son again.

Myers has lost many years, memories and dreams, but he has not lost faith.

“What I’m gonna do?” He ponders the question. “I’m just gonna keep on believing that I’m gonna get out of here.”

Myers has resisted giving in to the rotting fester of anger. He finds joy in simple things – music, passing on wisdom to the young men imprisoned with him, making friends.

The same flat, automated woman’s voice that announced the beginning of the call now announces its end.

“One minute remaining on the call.”

Myers rushes to say what he misses most about the world beyond the prison walls.

“I miss my family because I love, love, love my family,” he said. There is a smile in his voice. Then the line clicks.

And just like that, Rocky Myers is cut off from the world again.

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