This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

Cool Zone Media.

In July of 1984, a court-appointed defense attorney in Tennessee was fighting an uphill battle.

He didn't have a very sympathetic-looking client.

Joseph Paul Franklin was led into the courtroom shackled at the wrists and ankles.

He'd once escaped through the window of a police station during an interrogation.

During one of his trials, he'd gotten as far as hot wiring an elevator during a recess.

And he'd once been tackled by U.S. Marshals after trying to attack a prosecutor in a courtroom. Things were off

to a rocky start. The defense acknowledged that the jury would hear evidence about the defendants

passed, his membership in the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan.

They would hear in his own words, his views about race mixing, communism, and the Jews.

But they should just try to focus on the evidence.

Then the prosecution played the tape.

The defendant had already confessed.

For over an hour, the jury heard Franklin explain why and how he'd bombed the Beth

Shalom synagogue in Chattanooga in 1977.

"'I was trying to kill as many Jews as I could, he'd told the detective who interviewed him in prison.

That detective, surprised at this willingness to confess, asked him,

Don't you understand you're confessing to a serious crime?

And in that taped confession, Franklin replied, quote, I don't really think it is serious. I don't even consider it a crime. I think it was good.

The defense was simple. The only option they really had. The confession was fake, they argued.

This was a man who was willing to say anything to get transferred to a different prison.

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