Former Mayor Pens Novel

If it seems like the Chattahoochee Valley's turbulent past is ending up in the pages of a lot of books these days, well, there's another title to add to the library.

Attorney and former Columbus mayor Frank Martin has recently published his own book, "Sowega: A Tale of Southern Justice" -- a work of fiction based on a civil rights case he defended in 1971.

It's a self-published work, a method sometimes derisively called "vanity press." But for Martin, the publication of the new book is not so much about wanting to see his work in print more than 30 years after he began writing it.

It's more about wanting to see it on the screen.

The story is about the murder trial of a young black man named Robert Lee Jest who shot and killed the nephew of a country sheriff in self-defense. The deck was stacked heavily against Jest. The state couldn't find anyone willing to defend him, until Emory Law approached Martin under an indigent defense fund. The defense attorney, then 33, was six years into his Columbus law practice and already had tried death penalty cases.

But this became the hardest case of his career.

"It was a tough environment," he said. "I wish I had known more about it by the time I said yes."

Stacked deck

The prosecuting attorney and the judge were nephew and uncle, for instance, and Martin had to force the judge to recuse. And given the era, defending a black man accused of murdering a white man, with a white jury -- in rural Georgia, no less -- was almost unthinkable.

After defending the case, the young attorney was approached by a company making movies for ABC about writing a script. He initially agreed and wrote a bit of the manuscript before negotiations broke down.

"I'll just work on it on my own," Martin thought.

He wrote the book as chapters, starting with the final two. Only his closest family knew about the project.

"A lot of my friends were surprised, because I'd never said anything about it."

Martin, still an active attorney with The Martin Firm, is probably best known in Columbus as mayor from 1990-1994. Under his term, the city and Columbus Water Works hatched the idea for the Chattahoochee Riverwalk as a way of both luring people to the riverfront and battling a pollution problem caused by the city's antiquated sewer system. He was also instrumental in luring the 1996 Olympic softball games to town.

Pushing him to finish his pet project, "Sowega," was a friend, Earl Spann, whose interest in pushing a movie based on the text reminded Martin of why he'd begun writing the story in the first place.

O.J.'s lawyer a fan

"If someone thought it was a good idea then, maybe they'd think it's a good idea now," Martin said.

Among the book's fans is O.J. Simpson "dream team" attorney F. Lee Bailey, who had met Martin several times in courtrooms. In an e-mail to Martin, Bailey wrote, "For those who often fail to appreciate the perils of being a criminal defense lawyer -- presently a dying breed, I fear -- this story lays open this dangerous world like a raw wound."

He hasn't returned to Early County -- in southwest Georgia, where the word Sowega comes from -- since the trial, all those years ago. Martin has seen evidence in other small Georgia towns that the problems in the book go unsolved. He recently drove through a rural stretch of the state and was dismayed to see a local Sons of the Confederacy chapter sign, still proclaiming anger that Gov. Sonny Perdue didn't allow residents to vote for the Confederate battle flag emblem to be used again in the state flag.

"I think, in some places, 'Sowega' is alive and well," Martin said.

Locally, the book is available at Barnes & Noble Booksellers and Waldenbooks, or at online retailers like Amazon.com.