After a national search, the University of Georgia has chosen King & Spalding partner Michael Raeber as its executive director of legal affairs, effective Feb. 1. Raeber is a 1993 graduate of the UGA School of Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the Georgia Law Review. He joined King & Spalding in 1994 after clerking for Justice George Smith of the Georgia Supreme Court and Judge Stanley Birch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
A business litigator, Raeber was able to free James “Country” Parkerson from Dooly State Prison in 2010, where the Hawkinsville man had been serving a life sentence for a murder he said he did not commit. Raeber’s mother, Carol Raeber, had become Parkerson’s penpal and told her son about the case, according to a report in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Parkerson admitted being on the scene but said it was his roommate, Chip Thorpe, who stabbed a guest, Ira Morris, 51 times with a small-blade knife in 1993. Thorpe became a witness for the prosecution and testified that Parkerson killed Morris.
