THE STATE OF GEORGIA VERSUS CLEVON JAMEL JENKINS

by Robert Michael Kelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A history of the arrest, conviction, and subsequent legal history of man convicted in 1995.

Clevon Jamel Jenkins was a teenager in Georgia in 1995 when he was convicted of robbery and murder due to his participation in a group that robbed a convenience store and killed the owner. Represented at trial by two court-appointed lawyers, Jenkins, who maintained his innocence and claimed he had no knowledge of what his friends intended to do, was sentenced to life without parole after a trial that lasted two days. Kelly, in this memoir, recounts the known details of the crime and his own role in the story—he took the case to represent Jenkins in his motion for a new trial (Jenkins’ mother had worked as a legal secretary at Kelly’s New York law firm). The author points out several damning shortcomings on the prosecution’s part: There was no physical evidence connecting Jenkins to the crime, no eyewitnesses, and the only incrimination testimony came from one of the robbery participants, who was certainly guilty and had lied to the police several times about the case. Kelly likewise argues that both the judge and defense counsel had made several serious errors in the course of the trial, and yet the motion for a new trial and all later appeals were denied. He analyzes every one of these errors (and incompetencies) as the appeal made its torturously slow progress through the court system. Relying on court records and his own extensive personal archive, Kelly reconstructs every twist and turn in his campaign to get what he views as restorative justice for Jenkins.

Although it’s arguably unseemly of Kelly to refer to his own book as “riveting and thought-provoking,” it’s a largely accurate assessment, thanks to his narrative skill and enjoyably combative tone (“Although Jamel was found guilty by every court that reviewed his case,” reads a typical passage, “those decisions are not worth the paper they were written on”). The author is also very good at explaining and clarifying legal concepts, describing the mechanics, for instance, of how a direct appeal works. He follows the process at an almost day-by-day level of detail, providing lengthy quotes and filling the bottom of almost every page with footnotes. Kelly’s reliably dramatic and opinionated when it comes to his cast of characters—he asks of the appeals judge, “If he could not compose a simple one-paragraph order without making four major errors, how could he possibly rule on the complicated issues that were presented by Jenkins’ petition?” Kelly is the first to acknowledge that he can never know with 100% certainty that the claims of his former client are true; Jenkins could be lying about not knowing anything about the crime or about participating in it beyond the status of an observer. And despite his passionate advocacy throughout the narrative, he never really comes close to constructing a convincing case for Jenkins’ innocence; readers may question the complacency of the Georgia authorities, but it’s unlikely that many of them will side with Jenkins (and by extension Kelly) by the final page. Still, the book provides a genuinely compelling nuts-and-bolts account of how the U.S. justice system works.

A gripping and richly detailed breakdown of one Georgia murder case.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | GENERAL NONFICTION