[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 146 (Thursday, September 19, 2024)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E928]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





                         REMEMBERING MIKE CODY

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. STEVE COHEN

                              of tennessee

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 19, 2024

  Mr. COHEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay my sincere respects to 
Mike Cody, a highly respected Memphis lawyer who worked with Dr. Martin 
Luther King, Jr. during the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, before 
going on to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of 
Tennessee, the state's Attorney General, and a Memphis City Council 
member. Cody passed Sunday at 88. I knew Mike Cody all my adult life, 
worked as a volunteer in his City Council campaign, and clerked for him 
at Burch, Porter & Johnson, where he began his legal career in 1961. As 
firm founder Lucius Burch might have said, `the hair of the hypocrite 
was not seen about him.' After he, Burch and others met with King, Cody 
helped successfully argue, on the morning of April 4, 1968, for lifting 
a federal injunction preventing King from leading a second sanitation 
workers march after a first march ended in chaos. King was assassinated 
that evening. Cody worked with the Reverend James Lawson and others to 
form what became Memphis Area Legal Services, initially to meet 
individual sanitation workers' legal needs. He served as a Memphis City 
Councilman from 1975 to 1977 and was then appointed by President Jimmy 
Carter to be the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennessee 
into 1981. Scrupulously honest, he was known to prosecute both 
Democratic and Republican officials who abused their offices. An 
unsuccessful candidate in a special election for Memphis Mayor in 1983, 
Cody was soon appointed Tennessee's Attorney General during the 
administration of Republican Governor Lamar Alexander, serving from 
1984 to 1988. He was also Chair of the Memphis and Shelby County Crime 
Commission (1997-1998). In 2005, he was appointed to serve as the Co-
Chair of the Tennessee Commission on Ethics focusing on revising state 
ethics laws. In 2010, he was elected Co-Chair of the Society of 
Attorneys General Emeritus (SAGE).
  Cody graduated from Memphis East High School (1954), then earned his 
undergraduate degree from Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), 
in 1958, received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of 
Law in 1961, and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws from Rhodes in 
1989, where he served as an adjunct professor. As Attorney General, 
Cody argued four cases before the United States Supreme Court: Rose v. 
Rose, 481 U.S. 619 (1987), Rose v. Clark, 478 U.S. 570 (1986), 
Alexander v. Choate, 469 U.S. 287 (1985), and Tennessee v. Garner, 471 
U.S. 1 (1985). The landmark Garner case, in which Cody represented the 
State of Tennessee, established the precedent that an officer may not 
use deadly force to prevent the escape of a suspect without probable 
cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat to the officer 
or others. The case grew out of a police chase in Memphis. Cody also 
served as an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University School of Law, 
Memphis State University's School of Law, Rhodes College and LeMoyne 
Owen College. He served as a First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve 
from 1961 to 1967. He was the author of Honest Government: An Ethics 
Guide for Public Service (1992), and law review articles on excluding 
the mentally ill from the death penalty, Tennessee's experience with 
the privatization of correctional institutions, and on his 
representation of Dr. King in 1968, among other scholarly works. A 
member of the Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame and the Memphis Amateur 
Sports Hall of Fame, Cody was a runner since high school and ran in 
more than a dozen Boston Marathons, finishing fifth in his age group in 
1990. He served on the board of the National Civil Rights Museum, as 
vice chairman of the Memphis and Shelby County Library Foundation, and 
President of the Memphis in May International Festival (1996). I extend 
my sincere condolences to his wife Suzanna; his children Jane, Mia and 
Michael; his extended family, and his many friends. He did much for his 
community, the legal profession, his state and the Nation. His was a 
life well-lived.

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