'Deep Delta Justice' review: A landmark civil rights case

Set against the backdrop of virulent racism seen throughout the South during the civil rights movement, Matthew Van Meter's "Deep Delta Justice" takes readers through "one of the most important — and improbable — criminal cases in American history." A legal saga with an emphasis on storytelling, it's a valuable contribution to the literature on the civil rights movement and the ongoing fight against white supremacy.

In 1966, 19-year-old Gary Duncan was wrongfully arrested and accused of assault in Plaquemines Parish, a narrow and sparsely populated strip of land encompassing the last 70 miles of the Mississippi River. Richard Sobol, a young Jewish lawyer from New York who relocated to New Orleans to work on civil rights litigation, took the case. What followed was a hard-fought legal battle resulting in a Supreme Court decision that had a significant impact on America's criminal justice system.

As a young Black man living in a parish controlled by an avowed white supremacist, Duncan had a slim chance of a fair trial. Plaquemines was ruled by Leander Perez, an anti-integration autocrat with a larger-than-life personality and a political career that spanned five decades. After being excommunicated from the Catholic Church for his stance on integration, Perez built a snake-infested prison camp for "racial agitators" in an abandoned military outpost. "Perez invited Martin Luther King Jr. and his Communist overlords to come for a long visit," Van Meter writes, "adding with a wink that it was the only racially integrated facility in all of Plaquemines."

While "Deep Delta Justice" revolves around Duncan's case, the narrative branches out to the larger civil rights battles of the era, both in courtrooms and on the streets. The summer of 1967 saw major unrest throughout the country, and the National Guard was deployed in a dozen locations. In Louisiana, A.Z. Young led a 105-mile march from Bogalusa — referred to at the time as "Klantown, USA" — to the state Capitol in Baton Rouge.

At the center of Meter's book is Sobol, who came to New Orleans in 1965 to work for the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee. While originally intending to visit for a few weeks to handle cases as needed, Sobol changed his plans when he realized the amount of work required. He moved to New Orleans, took on Duncan's case and battled "the most notorious racist in the state."

Duncan v. Louisiana is considered a historic milestone in civil rights history, as the Supreme Court ruled that a state must adhere to the 14th Amendment's guarantee of a jury trial. Sobol would continue fighting on behalf of oppressed people. In 1972, he argued before the Supreme Court in favor of unanimous jury verdicts. He lost, but he told Meter that if the court were to later rule in favor of unanimous juries, he would say he won "retroactively."

Sobol died in March at the age of 82. In April, the Supreme Court ruled in Ramos v. Louisiana that guilty verdicts in criminal trials must be unanimous.