32 Facts About McCracken Poston

McCracken Poston was elected and served as a state representative in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1989 to 1997.

Previously, McCracken Poston was an assistant district attorney for Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit and the former president of Catoosa Country Chamber of Commerce.

McCracken Poston was an adjunct professor of American government at University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.

McCracken Poston is an active juvenile court judge and practices criminal law.

In 1988, McCracken Poston was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives from a district in Catoosa County where remained for a tenure of eight years.

McCracken Poston was defeated in the general election by incumbent Republican Nathan Deal, a former Democrat and former state house speaker with whom he had served in the state house from 1989 to 1993.

McCracken Poston even lost his own state house district, which covered part of the congressional district's northwest portion.

Only one other Democrat besides McCracken Poston has won even 30 percent of the vote since Deal switched parties.

McCracken Poston started a solo law firm in 1989 after briefly working for the Offices of Clifton Patty, and he has served as a juvenile court judge since 1997.

McCracken Poston represented Alvin "The Zenith Man" Ridley in an eight-day trial in January 1999.

McCracken Poston shared with Poston Virginia's journal, an evidentiary treasure trove consisting of 10,000 pages written over three decades.

The radio storytelling program Snap Judgment had McCracken Poston explaining how he defended Ridley and discovered Virginia's documents in the episode "Dirty Work" on November 27,2015.

McCracken Poston's writings reflected a happy marriage, with details of meals and TV programs the couple enjoyed.

McCracken Poston wrote prayers and observations from her Bible study, along with a never-submitted script for Unsolved Mysteries.

McCracken Poston argued that her hypergraphia could be part of her epileptic condition.

McCracken Poston wrote a book about the case, "Zenith Man: Death, Love, and Redemption in a Georgia Courtroom", published by Citadel Books, an imprint of Kensington Publishing.

McCracken Poston represented Byron "Low Tax" Looper in the Cumberland County case of the murder of Tennessee State Senator Tommy Burks in 1998.

Looper was found dead in his prison cell in 2013, a death that McCracken Poston has cited as "suspicious".

In 2002, McCracken Poston represented Ray Brent Marsh of the Tri-State Crematory who had been charged with two counts theft by deception for each body that was identified on his property in Noble, Georgia.

McCracken Poston put forth an aggressive defense for Marsh, threatening to require Walker County to conduct and pay for a costly trial that could potentially take months, and was partially successful in a change of venue effort in securing that the jury would be acquired from out of the area, which would have added great additional cost to Walker County.

McCracken Poston attacked the theories of prosecution that the state was utilizing, questioning how a human body could be the subject of a "fiduciary" relationship, and how a dead human body could be given the requisite monetary value to ascertain whether each body represented a misdemeanor or felony.

McCracken Poston attacked the scheme, pointing out that many of the clerks do not understand English sufficiently to ascertain what the operative was talking about.

Furthermore, McCracken Poston began to attack the method of the task force in identifying the clerks, which was a scanning of license plates and acquisition of registration and drivers licenses of the owners of the cars, followed by presenting the license photos to the operative to identify the suspects.

McCracken Poston filed a number of "Alibi" notices in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in his cases.

McCracken Poston was able to prove the operation's methods were so faulty that there were three of his clients misidentified by the government operative.

McCracken Poston proved that one of his clients was picking up her child from daycare several miles away in another state when the government claimed she was selling the operative pseudoephedrine.

Finally, for another young client arrested upon the return from his honeymoon McCracken Poston was able to prove he was working in a Subway sandwich shop on Long Island, New York when the government said he was in North Georgia, "knowingly" selling pseudoephedrine for use in the manufacture of methamphetamine.

In July 2012, McCracken Poston undertook assisting a woman from Murray County, Georgia, in filing a complaint against Murray County Chief Magistrate Judge Bryant Cochran.

McCracken Poston was a tenant and handyman of Judge Cochran.

McCracken Poston was joined in the effort by Chattanooga attorney Stuart James, who filed a civil suit on behalf of their client.

McCracken Poston had publicly stated that his client was a methamphetamine addict, which made her the more vulnerable to the set-up, and that the second arrest - although ostensibly legitimate - was a desperate attempt to again discredit his client, this time just weeks before Cochran's trial.

McCracken Poston was sentenced in 2015 to a five-year sentence.