Mitchell Zimmerman

Mitchell Zimmerman is a California attorney who got his client off San Quentin's death row after a 22-year legal struggle.

He was honored as an "Attorney of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his pro bono death penalty work. Mitchell, long a copyright and high technology lawyer with a Silicon Valley law firm, has been selected as a Northern California Super Lawyer for 15 years, and listed in The Best Lawyers in America for over a decade. LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review rates him as "Preeminent." He is a prolific writer on intellectual property issues.

In the 1960s Mitchell was a civil rights worker with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, Georgia and Mississippi, fighting for voting rights for African Americans and against segregation. Mitchell was co-author of the anti-Vietnam-war work, Dr. Spock on Vietnam (Dell 1968), which was translated into four languages.

Mississippi Reckoning, Mitchell’s first novel, is the story of an attorney who goes off the rails and plans a series of vigilante assassinations. And it is the multi-generational story of violence and abuse that turned a vulnerable child into the brutal killer whose execution ignites this saga of vengeance and revelation. The book is informed by Mitchell's experiences as a death penalty lawyer, but it is not the story of his case or his formerly-on-death-row client.

Mitchell is now working on a second novel, which is about a reactionary billionaire who has acquired a number of nuclear devices, and plans to use them to blackmail America into reversing our country's progress (such as it is) on racial and social justice matters. He begins by nuking a mountain in an uninhabited area of Utah to prove he's not just bluffing. Can he be stopped? Wait and see.

Mitchell is a graduate of City College of New York, Princeton University and Stanford Law School. He writes frequently on social justice issues for the syndicator OtherWords.com, and is a tireless writer of letters to the editor. A surprising number of his letters have been published by The New York Times over the decades since his first in 1968.