Millard Farmer papers

Born in 1934, noted death penalty defense attorney Millard C. Farmer, Jr. grew up in Newnan, Georgia. Majoring in Business Administration, Farmer graduated from the University of Georgia in 1956 with a BBA. He then worked in his father's agricultural supply business and attended Woodrow Wilson College of Law during the evenings in Atlanta, Georgia. He received LL.B, ML.B, and J.D. degrees and was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1967. Farmer built a successful practice in Newnan, and was a co-founder of the Bank of Coweta there.

Farmer also represented bootleggers and disadvantaged clients, and came to question whether African American defendants could be tried fairly before all-white juries. By 1970, he and his associates were challenging jury composition on the grounds of race. In 1975 he joined the Georgia Criminal Justice Council, a statewide indigent defense system. The following year he cofounded the Team Defense Project with Courtney J. Mullin, a social psychologist who had worked on jury composition, and Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Team Defense Project (TDP) was dedicated to the representation of indigent persons in death penalty cases. Farmer and TDP had a number of widely publicized successes. In one nationally followed 1977 case, Farmer and TDP prevented the "Dawson Five" from going to trial for a 1976 murder in Terrell County, Georgia, by drawing attention both to the lack of evidence against the defendants and to the local racial climate. However, the relationship between TDP and Dees' SPLC fragmented, leading SPLC to sue TDP unsuccessfully in 1977. Sustaining TDP financially would be a continuing challenge.

Most of Farmer and Team Defense Project's work was intended to bring attention to the inequities in the way capital punishment is used, and many of TDP's litigation strategies, such as jury composition challenges and motion filings it developed, have become widely adopted tactics. Farmer and his colleagues taught and lectured on these strategies to numerous legal groups and audiences. A number of attorneys worked with Farmer and TDP over the years, including Robert Altman, Joseph M. Nursey, and Andrea Young. Others joined Mullin in her team of social scientists and organizers, including Kimellen Tunkle, who would work with Farmer and TDP longer than anyone. Besides representing defendants at trial, Farmer has assisted many clients post-conviction, during lengthy and complex appeals. One such case was chronicled in the book by Sister Helen Prejean about Louisiana death row prisoners, Dead Man Walking (1994). Not all of Farmer's efforts were successful. He represented Henry Willis when Willis was convicted of participating in a 1976 murder, and pursued appeals for years before Willis's 1989 execution.

An acknowledged expert in capital cases, Farmer has also represented clients bringing racial discrimination suits. In the courtroom, he has been willing to draw attention to the attitudes of his opponents and to inequities in the justice system. In one widely publicized 1979 case, Farmer was held in contempt by Judge Elie L. Holton for repeatedly objecting to the fact that the prosecutor referred to his African American client, George Street, by his first name. Farmer spent three nights incarcerated in Blackshear, Georgia following Street's trial. Representing a man charged with murder in Lubbock, Texas in 1992, Farmer found evidence that prosecutors were aware of misconduct by the case's medical examiner. The prosecutors indicted him and two police officers who were willing to testify about the examiner. Supported by prominent attorneys in Texas and elsewhere, Farmer won an injunction of the prosecution against him and the officers in federal court, and ultimately a financial settlement (Farmer v. Sherrod).

Farmer died in 2020.