Lawyers for Gregory McMichael in Ahmaud Arbery slaying no strangers to high-profile cases
The husband-and-wife team of Macon attorneys who are representing Gregory McMichael, one of the men accused of murder in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, have handled their share of high-profile legal cases.
Over the past three decades, Laura D. Hogue, her husband Franklin J. Hogue and their Third Street firm Hogue Hogue Fitzgerald & Griffin have had roles in some of the region’s most publicized criminal proceedings.
Most recently, the firm’s present clients include Donnie Rowe, accused of gunning down two prison guards in an escape from a transport bus nearly three years ago in Putnam County, and Ronnie Adrian “Jay” Towns, who allegedly shot and killed Bud and June Runion in 2015 after they met in Telfair County in an apparent car-buying deal arranged on Craigslist.
Both Rowe and Towns face death penalty prosecutions, a defense realm the Hogues are versed in.
The Hogues, 1991 graduates of Mercer University’s law school, have since the turn of the century had as clients nine defendants who have at some point faced the death penalty if convicted. In seven of the now-closed cases, those accused received life sentences.
Those convictions include the case against Stephen McDaniel, who was represented by Frank Hogue and Floyd M. Buford Jr., in the 2011 slaying of Mercer law graduate Lauren Giddings.
Last year in federal court here, the Hogues represented Dave L. Carty, accused of money laundering and fraud in connection with a $3.7 million computing deal between his company and the Bibb County public schools years earlier. Carty was acquitted of 12 of the 13 charges against him, but the lone wire-fraud count he was convicted of netted him a four-year prison term.
Frank Hogue, 65, is an Indiana native who in college earned degrees in philosophy and theology. A client he represented in connection with the murders of three people in Dodge County in 2002 was, upon his acquittal in court some three years later, heard to say, “I want to thank my God and the law office of Frank Hogue.”
Thomas Jeff Gaillard II, another man the Hogues represented in 2003 in the shooting death of a Bloomfield Road convenience store owner, avoided the death penalty when he pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence. Gaillard had been the first person to face a death penalty prosecution in Macon since 1987.
In a 2011 interview, Frank Hogue told The Telegraph, “I oppose the death penalty. I think it’s uncivilized, ineffective and ought to go.”
Laura Hogue, 59, who majored in management at Columbus College before attending law school, began her legal career as a Bibb prosecutor.
In 1997, she helped send to prison for 20 years a man convicted in an attack on Macon police officer Beverly Grube. Laura Hogue, in her closing argument, had told jurors that Grube “gets up every day to protect us. They (the police) all do. They go out every day to serve and to protect us. You need to do your duty as a juror ... and protect them.’‘
Information from Telegraph archives contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 26, 2020 at 7:00 AM.