Attorney Dissects “Big Eddy Club”

I bought this book because I know some of the people from the PD that were involved in this case. For the first time in my life, I threw a book in the trash unfinished. If you want a completely distorted view of the south - read it, because that is what you will get.

The author leaves the impression that Phenix City, AL is still the human waste disposal it was before martial law was ordered and it was cleaned up to be the respected community today. Rose leads the reader to believe all the blacks in Columbus, GA live below Macon Road and all the whites live north of it — still. That is not true. And his superior European attitude about the US’s way of dealing with our criminals is your typical “look down your nose” type.

As for the story of Gary - consider Mr. Rose is an advocate against the death penalty and believes that the oppression of the “black man” still goes on in the ‘evil’ south to this day. And eventually he ended up on Gary’s legal team.

clipped from www.ledger-enquirer.com Mark Shelnutt has dined at the Big Eddy Club — twice. But that doesn’t make him a conspirator in the case against Carlton Gary. “Carlton Gary comes to Columbus in August 1977 and gets arrested in South Carolina in 1979, and everything happens in that time,” Shelnutt said. Rose was getting a free pass with the arguments in his book, Shelnutt said, and he spent more than 90 minutes detailing problems he believes run through its pages. Shrouding the case beneath the looming specter of racism in the South is Rose’s method of bypassing the case’s facts, he said. It’s ammunition to lead the reader away from the evidence — ammunition that tells the reader that judges, attorneys, detectives and everyone involved in the case are part of the conspiracy. Rose casts the case in the light of racism, Shelnutt said, and the Big Eddy Club is its symbol. “Nothing will ever change the fact that Carlton Gary is black and the victims are white,” Shelnutt said.