Lawyer's At Center Of Race, Gun Debate On 2 Charleston Cases

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Andy Savage keeps in his law office a sealed plastic bag with the blood-splattered clothes that Felicia Sanders wore sheltering her granddaughter from a fusillade of bullets that killed nine black parishioners at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. Down the hall, his colleagues met recently with another client, Michael Slager, the white former North Charleston police officer charged in the death of a black motorist in a shooting captured on an explosive cellphone video. On one hand, he represents the three survivors and families of five black parishioners who died in the church shooting, and is suing the federal government over the sale of a gun to a white man in the case; on the other, he's defending a white officer charged with murder after a black motorist was shot eight times in the back. Among them: a policeman charged in the death of a city jail inmate, a 17-year-old girl facing the death penalty in the slaying of a small-town police chief, a man accused of being a terrorist sleeper agent and an economics professor charged with bilking investment clients. Savage — who worked as a cabbie in New York during college before moving south and attending the University of South Carolina Law School, then began his career as an Air Force attorney and state prosecutor before turning to criminal defense — admits he's been criticized for taking Slager's case. Savage calls it "a terrible insult to justice in America" that the 33-year-old Slager was immediately fired, his first lawyer dropped him and his police association refused to pay his legal costs. More shootings followed, and lawmakers and officials struggled to close the so-called Charleston loophole, which allows three business days to finish vetting a gun buyer through a background check before the sale can proceed by default.

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