Rehabilitating an accused killer on death row
May God Have Mercy: A True Story of Crime and Punishment
by John C. Tucker '55
W.W. Norton & Co., $27.50

ON MARCH 10, 1981, in the gritty, southwestern Virginia coal town of Grundy, an intruder raped Wanda McCoy--a young married woman who was watching TV alone in her small but comfortable hillside home--and murdered her with the brutal slash of a knife. Soon after, the authorities arrested 22-year-old Roger Keith Coleman, who had been working as a coal miner after serving 20 months in prison for attempted rape. Coleman was convicted of the McCoy murder and spent most of the 1980s on death row, before his case became an international cause célèbre, even placing him on the cover of Time magazine in 1992. In bold type, Time's headline read, "This Man Might Be Innocent. This Man Is Due to Die."
Clearly, John C. Tucker '55 sympathizes with Coleman. A criminal defense attorney for many years in Chicago, Tucker--for reasons left unexplained--is presently pursuing a second career as a writer in southern Virginia. Fortunately, despite his tangible biases, Tucker's book provides a valuable service: It explains, in agonizing but fascinating detail, the endless and often mystifying procedures that envelop a complex criminal case like Coleman's. To the author's credit, readers cannot help but absorb the finer points of police work, private investigation and criminal defense--subjects that for most people go in one ear and out the other.
Tucker's solid, workmanlike prose suits the painstaking nature of his subject. The narrative rarely plods, benefiting instead from its subject's propulsive momentum.
Particularly noteworthy is Tucker's adeptness at presenting a creditable argument against the death penalty--that most gut-wrenching of controversies--without excessive rhetoric or emotion. Just like the first-rate defense attorney he claims to be, Tucker builds his foundation granule by granule until it becomes a sturdy structure. The process is so methodical that the reader barely realizes what's being created before his eyes.
Despite its successes, what Tucker's book probably will not do is turn a flood of death penalty supporters against capital punishment. Tucker so relentlessly punches holes in the selective, jerry-built evidence presented by Virginia's police and prosecutors that the reader cannot help but start to develop a healthy skepticism about theories that sound a bit too pat--such as the one (unvoiced by Tucker, but implied by his book) that Roger Keith Coleman's probable innocence is a convincing argument against all capital punishment. A principled argument can certainly be made that capital punishment is immoral. But that argument is far more convincing if it's made with more than one (possibly unrepresentative) case in mind.
Fortunately, that larger debate is beyond the scope of Tucker's book. Indeed, when measured against Tucker's decidedly narrower mission--writing a text that rehabilitates Roger Keith Coleman's reputation--May God Have Mercy succeeds admirably.
--Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson writes for National Journal magazine.

IT'S 7:30 ON A TUESDAY evening in November, and a crowd is beginning to fill up the spacious basement of The Jazz Standard, a new music room on East 27th Street in Manhattan. The club has been open for just one week, and there is a buzz of hopeful excitement in the air. Jazz is often lauded as "America's classical music," but that seems to be our way of honoring it without having to listen to it. "A lot of clubs have been closing lately," explains pianist and composer Jonny King '87, minutes before the Jonny King Quintet takes the stage. "A lot of New York jazz musicians are really rooting for this club to make it."
By day an intellectual properties lawyer with the Manhattan firm of Cowan, Leibowitz and Latman, King spends many of his evenings much as he did while he was an undergraduate: playing jazz clubs in and around New York City. This is a feat requiring at least as much endurance as musicianship, since there are few professions whose lifestyles clash as much as the law and jazz. "When I used to play Bradley's in the Village before it closed," King recalls, "we used to get paid at about five in the morning. I'd go home, get a few hours sleep, and go into the office."
Jazz was the hipster's music of choice 30 or 40 years ago. But faced with the ubiquitous and simple sounds of rock and pop, jazz got drowned out in the 1970s and '80s. It's hard to hum a John Coltrane solo. But we are in the midst of a jazz renaissance, propelled by the likes of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and saxophonist Joshua Redman, who four years ago gave King a big break by inviting him to join his band for a tour of Europe and North and South America.
A lifelong enthusiast who took up the piano at age nine after hearing the Scott Joplin soundtrack to The Sting, King is in the midst of a one-man crusade to get more people listening to jazz again. Playing live is just one part of the plan. King has just released his third CD, The Meltdown, on the German label Enja (www.enjarecords.com), and published his first book, What Jazz Is: An Insider's Guide to Understanding and Listening to Jazz.
"Why was the music I love so opaque to many people?" King asks rhetorically while recalling his Princeton's roommate's teasing observation that jazz is "five or six songs that you guys play over and over again." "What jazz lacks," he concludes, "is not inherent appeal, but familiarity itself. People just have not heard as much jazz as they have Mozart or the Who."
Written on a laptop, in hours snatched on buses and during vacations, What Jazz Is is not aimed at hardcore fans. "For curious beginners," said Publishers Weekly, "this is an excellent introduction to the often confounding world of jazz." An irrepressible enthusiast, King compares playing jazz to a conversation, an exchange requiring at least as much alert, sympathetic listening as speaking. He breaks the music down into its basic components and conventions (harmony, rhythm and swing, and group improvisation) and its key instruments and players. Finally, he chooses 10 cuts from his favorite period of jazz, the 1950s and '60s, and discusses them in detail. In fact, if you order What Jazz Is from the Book of the Month Club or Quality Paperbacks, you get a CD with all 10 cuts, which is helpful.
King has a graceful, conversational prose style--no surprise in a man whose third-year paper at Harvard Law School on the intricacies of copyrighting jazz won an award from ASCAP--and he describes music in easily understood, everyday metaphors.
As a pianist, King's own style owes a great deal to percussive, aggressive players like McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock. In The Meltdown King takes off in new directions, exploring Afro-Cuban rhythms on the title track and "Cochabamba" with the help of master percussionist Milton Cardona. "After Six," which King performs in the first set at The Jazz Standard, has some of Thelonious Monk's eccentricity and angular harmonies, while "Blues for Andrew Hill" is spare, offkilter blues.
Nine of the 11 cuts are original compositions; the other two are by King's favorites, Tyner and Bud Powell. Indeed, Tyner's "For Tomorrow" is one high point of the evening, drawing enthusiastic applause. It's one King especially admires, which makes sense, since, like King himself, it pays homage to jazz's past while inventing and strengthening its future.
--Merrell Noden '78