Paid publicists should leave it to the lawyers to defend guilty clients

Everybody accepts that the accused, and even the convicted, have the right to legal support, writes Terry Prone.

HE WAS just a gorgeous kid. Pure gorgeous. At 14, he was handsome with a beautifully sculpted face and great dark eyes. Even though he was so young, he could laughingly carry off a fedora. A picture of him with that grown-up hat tilted back from his face was printed out and pinned, along with two others, to the inside lid of his coffin by his mother. That, of course, was after the teenager was lynched.

Emmet Till was lynched in the American Deep South, a place where, in 1955, it was unsafe to be a young black man, particularly a young black man who had been raised mainly in a state that was less bigoted than Mississippi, where the accusation was made against him.