Morley Swingle is a former prosecutor now writing mystery/thrillers and law books.  As both a state and federal prosecutor, he personally prosecuted 111 homicide cases and tried 178 jury trials.  His cases have been featured on Dateline, Forensic Files and Oprah.

Morley has published numerous law journal articles and law manuals.  In 1995, his article on prosecutorial ethics entitled “Warning: Pretrial Publicity May Be Hazardous to Your Bar License,” won the W. Oliver Rasche Award from the Missouri Bar Association for being the “most outstanding article” published in the bar journal in 1994.  He had never heard of the award until he won it, but after learning it existed he tried for it over and over, finally winning it a second time in 2013 for his article on warrantless searches of smartphones.

In 1992, the FBI selected Morley as one of only 50 prosecutors in the nation (one from each state) to attend and graduate from the Advanced Course for Prosecutors at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.  Morley found the audience (other prosecutors) even more interesting than the instructors, since he sat between the prosecutor of Jeffrey Dahmer (for serial murder) and the prosecutor of Mike Tyson (for rape).

In both 1992 and 2003, the Missouri Mothers Against Drunk Driving named Morley as Missouri’s “Prosecutor of the Year.”

Two of Morley’s cases made it to the United States Supreme Court.  The prosecution won one and lost one, which is an excellent batting average in baseball, but not so good in appellate advocacy work.  All together, he personally briefed and/or gave the oral argument in nearly 40 appellate cases in both state and federal court, and won most of them.

Morley taught the “Criminal Law Update” at the Missouri Judicial College every year from 1993 to 2010, teaching Missouri’s trial judges the latest developments in criminal law.  It was a tough audience, since somewhere in the crowd would lurk the judge who presided over every specific case Morley would be discussing, and those darn judges would delight in catching Morley in even the smallest mistake.

Morley served 18 years on the Missouri Supreme Court’s Criminal Procedures Committee, which writes the book containing pattern jury instructions used in every criminal case in Missouri.  You won’t want to read that book unless you are either litigating a criminal case or having trouble falling asleep.

Morley’s law books include: (1) Warrantless Searches: What Every Successful Cop, Crook and Criminal Lawyer Needs to Know; (2) Search Warrants: What Every Successful Cop, Crook and Criminal Lawyer Needs to Know; (3) Evidence Foundation Questions in Criminal Law: Trial Practice Techniques Every Successful Prosecutor and Defense Lawyer Must Know; and (4) Geofence Search Warrants & Tower Dumps: How Law Enforcement Gets Them, Trial Techniques For Fighting Them.

Morley’s historical mystery legal thrillers include The Gold of Cape Girardeau (praised as “absorbing courtroom drama” by Elmore Leonard, and winner of the 2005 Missouri Governor’s Book Award) and Bootheel Man (finalist for the 2008 William Rockhill Nelson Award for fiction).  His true crime memoir Scoundrels to the Hoosegow: Perry Mason Moments and Entertaining Cases From the Files of a Prosecuting Attorney was called “engrossing” and “highly recommended” by Morley’s hero, Vincent Bugliosi.  His short story “Hard Blows” in the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Prosecution Rests was singled out by Publisher’s Weekly as “dramatizing the challenges prosecutors encounter,” and was a finalist for the 2010 Barry Award as the Best Mystery Short Story published that year.

Although relatively well-liked for a prosecutor, he occasionally found it necessary to wear a bullet-proof vest.