Retired Carroll County General Sessions and Juvenile Court Judge Larry Logan has added a new title to his resumé: author.
Logan’s book, The Judge’s Song: True Crime, was released Oct. 18 on Amazon.
It traces his life from growing up in post-World War II America through his years as a criminal defense attorney, special prosecutor and judge. Along the way, it recounts many of the cases that made headlines in Carroll County and beyond.
Logan said the book exists because of his two sons, who grew up hearing the stories and kept urging him to write them down
“They’d lived a lot of this, and they’d heard the tales and the stories,” Logan said. “They kept encouraging me, ‘You need to put that down on paper.’”
He took up the project after retiring. Writing it took about a year, much of it spent researching to refresh his memory.
Some of those stories directly affected his family. Logan recalled a period in the early 1980s when he was targeted by Nazi sympathizers. They vandalized his home, his office, and made numerous threats against him.
The book takes readers through many cases throughout Logan’s career.
They include a 1976 Henry County murder trial in which a McKenzie man shot an attacker armed with a shovel, a case Logan says helped push Tennessee to drop the requirement to retreat outside the home.
Other chapters cover the killing of Huntingdon businessman Serl Anderson, the 1978 McKenzie kidnapping that drew national coverage from NBC’s Tom Brokaw; a Memphis case involving the Outlaws Motorcycle Club; the heinous murder of Dennis Brooks, Jr.; and more.
Logan began practicing law in Carroll County in 1975 alongside attorneys Hance Lassiter and Kent Jones. He became a judge on Jan. 2, 1981, and went on to serve 41 years as the county’s General Sessions and Juvenile Court judge. At one point, Logan was the longest-serving General Sessions judge in Tennessee.
Over that time he handled criminal and civil cases in both General Sessions and Juvenile Court, as well as child support court. He eventually gave up his private practice because, he said, it didn’t seem fair for a sitting judge to be practicing against other attorneys.
When asked what he hopes readers take away from the book, Logan answered without hesitation: Carroll Academy, the alternative school he helped found.
He credits the late Gov. Ned Ray McWherter with helping make it happen. Logan said that McWherter reached across party divides and asked how much money the program needed. Logan said he told him $1.5 million.
“He said, ‘You got it. Good luck,’” Logan recalled. “Never a word about politics.”
Logan said he still runs into former students, now grown with children of their own, who stop him at the grocery store to thank him for sending them to the Academy.
“That’s what it’s all about,” he said.
Logan said he may write a second book, this time fiction drawn from what he knows best: being a lawyer and a judge. He has already sketched an outline.
“The Judge’s Song: True Crime” is available on Amazon. https://link.amazon/B01MmUSfY
