Rufus Buckley was the Madison County, Mississippi district attorney during the 1980s.
Biography[]
Rufus Buckley was born in Madison County, Mississippi, and he became a lawyer before being elected Madison County's district attorney as a Republican. Buckley was a careerist who sought to advance into the political realm through his involvement in legal cases, and, in 1984, he prosecuted the vigilante Carl Lee Hailey and favored the death penalty. Despite Judge Omar Noose's rejection of a change of venue, and the intervention of the Ku Klux Klan, Hailey was acquitted of murder due to a strong defense by Jake Brigance, and Buckley lost the case.