Franklin J. Hogue began his law career in 1991 with the Macon law firm then known as Brown, Katz, Flatau & Hasty. While he represented a variety of clients in his five years with that firm, his primary focus was and has always been in criminal defense. In early 1996 he formed his own law firm and practiced solo for about two years. In late 1997, his wife, Laura, became his law partner, forming Hogue & Hogue. Together they built a successful criminal defense practice, adding Keith Fitzgerald to the firm in 2010 and Travis Griffin in 2012. In 2017, they formed the law firm of Hogue Griffin. They practice exclusively criminal defense, having represented hundreds of people in state and federal courts, both at the trial and appellate levels, throughout Georgia.
Frank’s cases are as diverse as murder, money laundering, drugs and drug conspiracy, sex offense cases, all manner of fraud cases including tax, wire, bank, and mail fraud, and many more-virtually any kind of criminal case. His clients have received acquittals or dismissals in every type of case he tries, including an acquittal in a triple-murder case. He has represented individuals in eight death penalty cases-none of his clients in those cases is on death row.
Frank has been named by his peers to Georgia’s “Super Lawyers” each of the past several years, as well as to Georgia’s “Legal Elite,” an honor reserved for lawyers in the top five percent of their practice area. His peers have also given him the highest rating possible for legal ability and ethical standards in Martindale-Hubble. In 1999, Frank joined the faculty of the William “Bill” Daniel Trial Advocacy Program, an intense training for new criminal defense lawyers in Georgia, sponsored by the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The next year, he joined the faculty of the National Criminal Defense College, the highly respected annual summer college for criminal defense lawyers from all over the United States. The year after that, in 2001, he joined the faculty of Walter F. George School of Law, Mercer University, as an adjunct, where he taught Advanced Criminal Trial Techniques to final-semester law students interested in pursuing a career in criminal law for 12 years. He is also on the faculty of the Baldus-Darrow Death Penalty Defense College, where he has taught for several years.
Frank has spoken at numerous state and national criminal defense seminars around the country, from Maine to Florida to Colorado. Frank is a past-president of the Macon Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and he served as the 2012 President of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the second largest association of criminal defense lawyers in the country. He is also a member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He serves as President of the Board for the Federal Defenders of the Middle District of Georgia, an organization dedicated to the defense of indigent citizens in the United States District Court. He was the Criminal Justice Act Panel Representative, appointed by the Chief Judge for the Middle District of Georgia, from 1998 to 2015.
In 2013, Frank was inducted as a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers, an organization that limits its membership to the top one percent of trial lawyers in any given state, membership that is extended only to those who are rated by their peers as exceptional in courtroom skill, ethics, and collegiality.
In 2016, Frank was invited, along with seven other colleagues, to create and teach a program of criminal defense trial skills to lawyers in the Republic of Georgia, a former Soviet Republic, which, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989-1991, returned to its former constitution, adding jury trials to the rights of its citizens. He has traveled to Georgia to teach six times over the last three years, with several more teaching trips in the planning stage.
Publications
Criminal Law, Mercer Law Review, 1997-2011