H. Morley . Swingle
Office of Circuit Attorney
Morley Swingle practices law in Parker, Colorado. He is a former Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri and served as the Prosecuting Attorney for Cape Girardeau County, Missouri for twenty-five years. He has taught search and seizure law at seminars around the country. He has tried 141 jury trials, prosecuted 79 homicide cases and written dozens of law journal articles and law book chapters. From 1999 to 2012, he served on the Missouri Supreme Court's Committee on Procedure in Criminal cases (formerly called the Committee on Jury Instructions and Charges). In 1992, Swingle was selected by the FBI as one of only 50 prosecutors in the country to attend and graduate from the Advanced Course for Prosecutors at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In 2007, he received an Honorary Order of the Coif Award from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law. Swingle is also an author of two mystery novels with legal themes, The Gold of Cape Girardeau, which won the Missouri Governor's Book Award in 2005, and Bootheel Man, which was a finalist for the 2008 William Rockhill Nelson Award for excellence in fiction. He has also written a true crime and humor memoir about being a prosecutor, Scoundrels to the Hoosegow: Perry Mason Moments and Entertaining Cases From the Files of a Prosecuting Attorney. Vincent Bugliosi called Scoundrels “excellent” and “highly recommended.” It is in the law libraries of a third of the nation's law schools, including schools like Harvard and Yale, which passed on the opportunity to have Swingle as a student. He is a member of Mystery Writers of America and his short story, “Hard Blows,” (a prosecutor may strike hard blows but fair ones) appeared in the MWA fiction anthology, The Prosecution Rests (Little Brown 2009), and was a finalist for the 2010 Barry Award given to the best mystery short story published that year.
(09/15)
