Dr. William Pepper
Attorney
Host: Charles Giuliani
Previously Aired On: Monday, September 29, 2008 – Listen to the Show!
Dr. William Pepper (born August 16, 1937) is a barrister in the United Kingdom and admitted to the bar in numerous jurisdictions in the United States of America. His primary work is international commercial law. He has represented governments in the Middle East, Africa, South America, and Asia.
He was the attorney for James Earl Ray, the convicted killer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, some years after King’s death. He believes that Ray was framed by the federal government, and that King was killed by a conspiracy that involved the FBI, the CIA, the military, the Memphis police, and organized crime figures from New Orleans and Memphis. Pepper, a friend of King in the last year of his life, represented James Earl Ray in a televised mock trial in an attempt to get Ray the trial that he never had. Pepper then represented the King family in a wrongful death civil trial King family vs. Loyd Jowers and “other unknown co-conspirators.” During a trial that lasted four weeks he produced over seventy witnesses. The jury took less than an hour to find in favor of the King family for the requested sum of $100. Jowers never testified.
William Pepper was a young journalist, just back from Vietnam, when he first met Martin Luther King Jr. His photographs and first-hand accounts of the war prompted King’s unflinching commitment to oppose it. On 15 April 1967 Pepper proposed an alternative to the re-election of Lyndon Johnson to a cheering New York crowd. Dr. Benjamin Spock was to be King’s running mate highlighting an antipoverty and antiwar agenda. A year later Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. The movement for social and economic change in the US has never been substantially, successfully revived.
