 Thomas McKee West collection
Collection DescriptionHistorical NoteThomas M. West graduated from the University of Georgia School of Law. Upon graduation in 1973 he worked as a staff attorney in the University of Georgia School of Law Legal Clinic, litigating Constitutional issues and in the process helped create significant legal precedent concerning the rights of parolees and the rights of those pleading guilty. After two years with the legal clinic, attorney West took a position in Atlanta as the first director of the Southern Prisoner Defense Committee. The SPDC litigated prison condition cases in federal courts in Georgia and Tennessee including a class action case, which closed down the infamous H-House, the punitive isolation chamber at the Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Center. Attorney West has had an active criminal, personal injury, and police brutality practice in Atlanta since 1980. Law Group of Geerdes & Kim, LLC - Thomas McKee West, Esq. http://www.gklawgroup.com (Retrieved August 12, 2009) Scope and ContentThe collection consists of copies of documents, textual and audio, accumulated during Thomas M. West's successful challenge - in the case of Timothy Dawson vs. The State of Georgia - to the state of Georgia's law prescribing death by electrocution in the electric chair in death penalty cases. This includes fifteen digital copies of 22 Georgia electrocutions of prisoners between 1983 and 1996. These recordings are copies of West's tapes which were themselves dubs of original tapes recorded by members of the state's Department of Corrections for their own records, and later subpoenaed and entered into state court records as part of challenges to the electric chair statute. In addition, the collection includes copies of materials (transcripts, documents, affidavits, autopsy records, etc.) West and his co-counsel Robert Citronberg had accumulated to date of donation (August 2004) in support of legal challenges to the Georgia statute prescribing lethal injection as the new means of state execution. Administrative InformationPreferred CitationThomas McKee West collection, ms3244, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries. Related Materials and SubjectsSubject TermsRelated Collections in this RepositoryRelated materials available in the following collections of this repository: Southern Center for Human Rights collection, ms3277. | ||||||||||||||||||||