About
George R. (Bob) Dekle, Sr., served as a legal skills professor at the University of Florida, where he directed the Prosecution Clinic from January of 2006 to June of 2016 and taught both Prosecutorial Ethics and Florida Criminal Procedure. Upon retiring he was voted emeritus status by the Law School faculty. Dekle has kept active in retirement writing and speaking on trial advocacy and legal history.
Before coming to the University of Florida, Mr. Dekle served from 1975 through 2005 as an Assistant State Attorney for the Third Judicial Circuit of Florida, prosecuting almost every imaginable type of case, from criminal mischief to capital murder. In 1986 he received the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association's Gene Barry Memorial Award as the outstanding assistant state attorney in the state. In 1996 and again in 2003 he received distinguished faculty awards from the association's education committee, and upon his retirement in 2005, he was given a lifetime achievement award for his efforts in continuing legal education for prosecutors. Mr. Dekle has served as faculty at the National Advocacy Center in Columbia, South Carolina, and has lectured to prosecutor's associations across the nation. Before becoming a prosecutor, Mr. Dekle served from 1973 to 1975 as an Assistant Public Defender in the Third Judicial Circuit.
Mr. Dekle has previously authored or co-authored eight books:
Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts (The Kent State University Press, 2019).
Prairie Defender: The Murder Trials of Abraham Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017) (Awards: Superior Achievement Award for Scholarship, Illinois State Historical Society, May 2018; Gold Medals for Biography and Politics, Florida Authors and Publishers Association, August, 2018);
The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case: A Critical Analysis of the Trial of Bruno Richard Hauptman (Talbot Publishing, 2016) (co-author);
Abraham Lincoln’s Most Famous Case: The Almanac Trial (Praeger, 2014);
Cross Examination Handbook: Persuasion, Strategies, and Techniques, second edition (Wolters-Kluwer, 2014) (co-author);
The Case against Christ: A Critique of the Prosecution of Jesus (Cambridge Scholars, 2012);
The Last Murder: The Investigation, Prosecution, and Execution of Ted Bundy (Praeger, 2011);
Prosecution Principles: A Clinical Handbook (Thomson-West, 2007).
Featured Work
Six Capsules: The Gilded Age Murder of Helen Potts
As Ted Bundy was to the latter half of the twentieth century, so Carlyle Harris was to the latter half of the nineteenth. Harris, a brilliant, charismatic, handsome young medical student with an insatiable appetite for sexual conquest, left a trail of debauched women wherever he went. The trail came to an end with Helen Potts, a beautiful young daughter of wealth and privilege who was determined to keep herself pure for marriage. Unable to conquer her by any other means, Harris talked her into a secret marriage under assumed names, and when she became inconvenient, he poisoned her. The resulting trial garnered nationwide headlines and launched the careers of two of New York’s most famous prosecutors, Francis L. Wellman and William Travers Jerome. It also spurred vigorous debate about Harris’s guilt or innocence, the value of circumstantial evidence, the worth of expert testimony, and the advisability of the death penalty. What was completely overlooked in the hue and cry was the decisive role that the second-class status of women in Gilded Age culture played in the tragedy.
