QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Exonerees Jimmy Dennis and Michael White of Philadelphia said there should be “collective outrage” over how innocent people are treated by police, prosecutors and others in the justice system, whether today or a century ago. “We are deeply disgusted by the behavior of the state, but it is emblematic of what we also have went through, so we came here today to stand up with the family and stand for what we see as our little brother,” said Dennis, who last month was awarded $16 million by a jury after spending 25 years on death row, the largest exoneree verdict in Philadelphia history."
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MORE QUOTES OF THE DAY: “They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, 94, of Chester, the last surviving sibling in the family of 13 children, said at a press conference Monday. “They need to pay for killing my brother.” She was only about a year old at the time, and her parents, devastated, did not talk about it much. They had run a boarding house in Coatesville, but abandoned the business and left town as the scandal garnered national attention, she said. “This tragedy haunted the family, haunted the parents, haunted Susie, haunted (trial lawyer) William Ridley and his family,” said Philadelphia lawyer Joseph Marrone, who filed the federal lawsuit on Friday against Delaware County and the estates of two detectives and a prosecutor who had pursued the case.“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” Marrone said."
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STORY: "Family of Black Pa. teen wrongly executed in 1931 seeks damages after 2022 exoneration," by Associated Press Reporter Maryclaire Dale, published by WHYY, on May 20, 2024.
SUB-HEADING: Sixteen-year-old Alexander McClay Williams remains the youngest person the state has put to death. He was exonerated by Gov. Tom Wolf after researchers dug up new evidence."
PHOTO CAPTION: "Sam Lemon, right, speaks during a news conference with Susie Williams Carter, center, and lawyer Michael Pomerantz, Monday, May 20, 2024, in Philadelphia. Carter is the sister of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander McClay Williams, 16, and Lemon is the great-grandson of the attorney who represented him. Carter is suing the county where the Black teenager was convicted in 1931. The suit comes two years after Williams' conviction by an all-white jury was vacated."
GIST: "The family of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania — a Black 16-year-old sent to the electric chair in 1931 and exonerated by the governor in 2022 — is suing the county that prosecuted him.
Alexander McClay Williams was convicted of murder in the October 1930 icepick stabbing of a white woman in her cottage on the grounds of his reform school.
Vida Robare, 34, had been stabbed 47 times.
Her ex-husband, who also worked at the school, reported finding the body, and a photograph of an adult’s bloody handprint, taken at the scene, was examined by two fingerprint experts.
But that wasn’t mentioned at the trial, nor was the fact that she had been granted a divorce on the grounds of “extreme cruelty.”
The 5-foot-5, 125-pound Williams instead quickly became a suspect, even though his hands were smaller, there were no eyewitnesses and no evidence linked him to the crime.
He was held for days of interrogation without his parents or a lawyer on hand, and ultimately signed three confessions, researchers found.
“They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, 94, of Chester, the last surviving sibling in the family of 13 children, said at a press conference Monday. “They need to pay for killing my brother.”
She was only about a year old at the time, and her parents, devastated, did not talk about it much.
They had run a boarding house in Coatesville, but abandoned the business and left town as the scandal garnered national attention, she said.
“This tragedy haunted the family, haunted the parents, haunted Susie, haunted (trial lawyer) William Ridley and his family,” said Philadelphia lawyer Joseph Marrone, who filed the federal lawsuit on Friday against Delaware County and the estates of two detectives and a prosecutor who had pursued the case.
“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” Marrone said.
Gov. Tom Wolf apologized on behalf of Pennsylvania when he exonerated Williams, and called his execution “an egregious miscarriage of justice.”
District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said the teen’s constitutional rights had been violated, and a Delaware County judge vacated the conviction.
Williams had been sent to the Glen Mills School for Boys for starting a fire that burned down a barn, Carter said.
The 193-year-old school closed in 2019 after a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation into decades-long allegations of child abuse.
Author and educator Samuel Lemon had known about the case since he was a child because Williams was defended at trial by his great-grandfather, William H. Ridley.
The only Black lawyer in Delaware County at the time, Ridley had been paid $10 for the trial, with no support for investigators or experts.
He faced off against a team of 15.
Lemon researched the case, tracking down the 300-page trial transcript, and found problems with the evidence, including documents that show Williams’ age incorrectly listed as 18, not 16, along with the husband’s history of abuse.
“As I unpeeled the layers, it became quite evident to me that Alexander McClay Williams was innocent,” Lemon said. “This was kind of a legal lynching.”
Carter said the truth about her brother might never have been known if not for the work by Lemon and others.
“My mother kept saying, ‘Alex didn’t do that. There’s no way he could have done that.’ She was right. But it affected us all,” she said.
Osceola Perdue, a 57-year-old niece of Alexander Williams, said the story pained her when she learned of it, and still resonates today.
“It cut deep because, if you think about it, it’s still going on to this day. You get pulled over by police, you’re scared to death, even me as a woman,” Perdue said. “I still go back to my uncle, thinking how he felt … This keeps happening. It doesn’t stop.”
The Williams family, Marrone said, has the same right to pursue damages as more recent exonerees, nine of whom, all Black men, joined the family at the podium Monday.
Exonerees Jimmy Dennis and Michael White of Philadelphia said there should be “collective outrage” over how innocent people are treated by police, prosecutors and others in the justice system, whether today or a century ago.
“We are deeply disgusted by the behavior of the state, but it is emblematic of what we also have went through, so we came here today to stand up with the family and stand for what we see as our little brother,” said Dennis, who last month was awarded $16 million by a jury after spending 25 years on death row, the largest exoneree verdict in Philadelphia history."
The entire story can be read at:
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FROM WIKIPEDIA ENTRY: "On June 8, 1931, Williams was executed in Pennsylvania's electric chair. Reporters stated that Williams was emotional, visibly shaking, and reliant on the assistance of a deputy during his walk to the death chamber, and that his voice choked with emotion as he attempted to pray with the prison chaplain.[12] He was placed in the chair at 7:01 a.m. and pronounced dead five minutes later, after one shock.[25] Williams became the youngest person the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ever executed.[26] Relatives claimed his body for burial in an unmarked grave at Green Lawn Cemetery in Chester, Pennsylvania. After a GoFundMe crowdfunding effort to raise money, Williams had a headstone installed 87 years later, in 2018, for $850 USD. The headstone is engraved with text reading, "Executed for a crime he did not commit. Justice deferred is justice denied." Dr. Samuel Lemon, Williams's only surviving sibling Susie Williams-Carter, and several other surviving relatives attended the headstone's dedication ceremony on September 29, 2018.[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_McClay_Williams
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
---------------------------------------------------------------
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
————————————————————————————
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater's attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, "Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it's the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-12348801
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