“ERIC MICKELSON: white man. Beverly Arthur: white woman.” In his musical drawl—which, in concert with his beseeching eyes and folksy acuity, makes him a formidable trial lawyer—Dale Cox lists some of the murderers for whom he and his colleagues have sought the death penalty. “Brandy Holmes: white woman.” The district attorney’s office of Caddo Parish doesn’t select capital cases by race, he insists; and so at least one of the allegations that have made its prosecutors among the most infamous in America—and made the contest to lead them so heated—is, Mr Cox maintains, unfounded.

The controversy, though, is real, and Mr Cox himself is its epicentre. The attention arose partly from an item on “60 Minutes”, a current-affairs TV show, about Glenn Ford, who spent 30 years on death row before new testimony led to his release in 2014; he died of cancer in June this year. But Mr Cox’s own comments about the case and about the death penalty, which he thinks should be used “more rather than less”, contributed, helping to make Caddo Parish a focus of national angst about race and justice. In turn the fuss drew George Soros, a financier and philanthropist, into this week’s election for district attorney (DA). The run-off for the job is on November 21st; at the last count, Mr Soros had spent $851,000 on the campaign, a startling sum for a small corner of Louisiana with a population of 250,000.

Stranger still, Mr Cox isn’t even running. Feeling grievously misunderstood, he points out that he has been in charge of the operation, as acting DA, only since April, when his predecessor was found dead in a hotel room in Baton Rouge (no foul play suspected). After a long spell in private practice he rejoined the office full-time only in 2011; his sole involvement in the Ford case, over which he has received death threats, was to help free the exonerated man, a move he says other prosecutors strongly resisted. He does, however, think that Ford belonged behind bars, albeit not on death row, because of his alleged role in an armed robbery that culminated in murder, and possibly in the killing itself. “Spending 30 years in prison”, Mr Cox says, “was not all that much for what he actually did.”

Beyond the wrecking of Ford’s life, for critics of the DA’s office the case matters because some of the problems that led to his conviction seem to persist. One is inadequate funding of defence lawyers, which in lesser cases can mean defendants are represented by the untrained or unremunerated. Another is the racial make-up of juries: Ford, who was black, was convicted of killing a white man by an all-white panel. A study by Reprieve Australia, a human-rights group, recently found that from 2003 to 2012 Caddo prosecutors deployed “peremptory strikes”, used to eliminate prospective jurors, three times as often against blacks as others; the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Centre of New Orleans plans to sue over the findings. Some trace a line from that lopsided statistic to the double-sided drinking fountain at the rear of the parish courthouse (separate sides, once, for blacks and whites), the oak trees in the grounds from which, when the parish was known as “Bloody Caddo”, black people were lynched, and the ornate Confederate monument outside the front door.

All that is ancient history, replies Mr Cox, noting the area’s black mayors, judges and police chiefs. He resents what he decries as the anachronistic, unfair assumption that southern prosecutors are “inherently racist” and so uniquely vilified as “loathsome creatures”. The study found that he personally struck off 38% of black jurors, against 14% of others; sighing, Mr Cox says his record has been misrepresented, arguing that, since most of the victims of crime in the parish are black, he naturally wants blacks on juries. (Ursula Noye, the report’s author, says the chances that the overall imbalance it documents is unrelated to race are “vanishingly small”.)

Mr Cox does, however, admit to some other courtroom excesses. “Is this a family magazine?” he asks, laughing, when pressed on lurid allegations that he recently threatened a defence team with bodily violence. Yes he wanted to “cold cock” them (ie, knock them out), but because in a pleading they described him as “unusually bloodthirsty”, which he regarded as defamatory. Likewise he confesses to having once, in court, threatened a defence lawyer with prosecution. And, in a post-trial filing, he did indeed write that lethal injection was too good for a defendant, who “deserves as much physical suffering as [is] humanly possible”. “I regret that I have those emotions,” Mr Cox says, and “that I can’t be more forgiving.”

Conversely he condemns as “bullshit” and “madness” the antics of some Caddo prosecutors who, in 2012, were found to have bought automatic weapons with public money, supposedly for use when they accompanied the police on raids; some formed a paramilitary club called the Zombie Response Team. Mr Cox thinks no prosecutor should ever go on raids; he has never owned a gun. The trouble was, some viewed that episode as symptomatic of a macho, cavalier attitude to prosecutions, which takes too little regard for the quality of evidence or defendants’ circumstances. That, in turn, is thought by some to be epitomised in Mr Cox’s outspoken advocacy of the death penalty.

“We don’t start getting the noose ready,” when there is a murder, Mr Cox says; his office doesn’t always seek the death penalty when it could or secure it when it does. It is “tripe” that he is a “zealot”, he complains, sighing again and pinching the bridge of his nose as he recalls the names of the felons for whom he has personally secured death sentences. (It is a short list, but then very few death sentences are passed at all these days: Caddo accounted for two of the three in Louisiana last year.) Yet, citing Rousseau, Mr Cox says that some criminals violate the social contact so egregiously that they “have forfeited the right to live among us”. The death penalty is not a deterrent, he acknowledges, since those who deserve it “can’t be deterred because they’re too evil”. And yes, justice is “precarious and fraught with error”, a qualm borne out by the high rate of exoneration from Louisiana’s death row. Nevertheless “societal revenge” sometimes requires monsters to be executed.

Increasingly so, in fact. Louisiana’s murder rate, though still America’s highest, has fallen by more than two-fifths in the past 20 years; homicides in Shreveport, the biggest city in Caddo Parish—home of the courthouse and assorted casinos—fell from 86 in 1993 to 28 last year. But the “savagery”, Mr Cox believes, has become more “abysmal”, worse than during his first stint in the DA’s office, when, good Catholic that he is, he opposed the death penalty. (Lawyers who knew him then say he has changed unrecognisably.) The pope doesn’t see what he sees, he says. In particular he believes there is an epidemic of child abuse: “We are killing and raping our young” and “it breaks my heart”. “I have to look at the pictures,” he laments, “and I have to talk to the families.” Mr Cox knows he has “been characterised as Darth Vader”, but, he confides, his expression pained, after a trial “you go home and weep at night”.

As well as the depravity, his other main justification is that it isn’t only him. One local defence lawyer is hoping Mr Cox leaves the DA’s office after the election, which he thinks will help save his client’s life. Perhaps; but, as Mr Cox says, Caddo’s miniature death-penalty boom involves other prosecutors, judges in higher courts who uphold the sentences and, above all, the juries who pass them. “I could jump up and down and scream for [a death sentence] and do cartwheels over the courtroom,” Mr Cox says, but only a unanimous jury can impose one. In the end, he reiterates, “The death penalty is the law.”

DA agonistes

That local climate—still more pro-death penalty than in some parts of America—may be why no one in the DA race is against it. That includes James Stewart, a judge and former prosecutor, reputed to be tough but fair, whom Mr Soros is backing. Mr Stewart supports the death penalty where the facts warrant it. Quite aside from those views, Mr Soros’s involvement is eccentric, in its discretion as well as its scale. The billionaire himself has not explained it publicly; a person listed on the records of the relevant political action committee hung up when The Economist called. Meanwhile Mr Stewart’s campaign says it doesn’t want or need Mr Soros’s money or the television adverts it has bought (none of which mention the death penalty). Mr Stewart, incidentally, is black.

For his part Dhu Thompson, his opponent in the run-off, asks darkly what Mr Soros is hoping to get out of Caddo. He has challenged Mr Soros to a debate, so far unsuccessfully. Until the race Mr Thompson was an assistant DA, specialising in homicide prosecutions; according to the Reprieve study, the imbalance in his strike rate of black and other jurors is worse than Mr Cox’s. “The only colours I see”, he vows at Cat Daddy’s café in Shreveport, “are the colour of victims’ blood and the colour of tears.” No case of his has ever been reversed on grounds of discrimination. He emphasises his plans for community outreach and offender-diversion programmes, and stresses his endorsement by LaLeshia Walker Alford, a former judge and one of his first-round opponents, whom Mr Thompson describes as a “vibrant spirit”. That is one way of putting it: Ms Alford was removed from the bench for (among other reasons) telling a witness that he could wind up in juvenile detention, and “by the time your lawyer get to you, you would have been raped”.

In a parish almost evenly split between blacks and whites—and a region where voting tends to divide on racial lines—the new DA will be whichever candidate captures a bigger sliver of the other group. Whoever wins, Mr Cox hopes to continue prosecuting. He ultimately decided not to run himself, he says, because his experience as acting DA persuaded him he wasn’t cut out for management, and because he had become the focus of so much outside criticism. There was another reason, too, he discloses: nobody supported him, not even in the DA’s office itself. “People don’t like me,” he says.