George Stinney Was Executed By South Carolina At Age 14

This story has haunted me ever since I saw it mentioned on the front page of The West Side Spirit (June 10-16, 2021, "Eli's Final Chapter"). In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney, an African-American, was put to death by the State of South Carolina, writes Ben Krull, "accused of murdering two white girls, ages seven and 11." After what Krull calls a "slipshod one-day trial," Stinney was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair "based on flimsy, circumstantial evidence." The death sentence was carried out within three months, which did not give Stinney a chance for a retrial.

This case is the subject of a book by the late Eli Faber called The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr. and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South. Faber was a retired professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. The book was published on June 25, 2021 by the University of South Carolina Press.

This is the first time I ever heard of a person so young going to the electric chair. It should come as no surprise that in a Southern state like South Carolina, the life of a black person, adult or child, had no value.

The Child in the Electric Chair deserves to be read. It also deserves to be adapted into a major motion picture, showing the cruelty, injustice, and bloodthirstiness of the Jim Crow South. This book should give advocates of the death penalty an opportunity to reconsider its use and to acknowledge the barbarism of the death penalty.

True Crime On The Radio

I can't recall on which old-time radio show I first heard an episode of the true-crime series, Somebody Knows. It was either Hollywood 360 (nationally syndicated) or The Golden Age of Radio (on New York's WBAI-FM).

Somebody Knows, which ran on CBS, was the forerunner to such shows as Unsolved Mysteries. Per my sketchy notes, the episode I heard concerned a 39-year-old  Boston cab driver named Samuel I. Paris, who was robbed and killed in April 1948.The episode aired on August 10, 1950. "Through narration and dramatizations," reports the CD/DVD website Amoeba.com, "the known facts of unsolved crimes were presented and listeners who provided information leading to the conviction of a criminal" would be given a cash reward.

According to the website, only two of the eight episodes are available on recordings. As an old-time radio fan, especially of detective and mystery shows, I would love to hear not only those two episodes but those of another show Wanted, the rival of Somebody Knows, that ran on NBC. Wanted, according to Amoeba.com, "avoided dramatizations all together [sic]" but instead used the recorded "voices of DAs, newspapermen, police, prison officials, witnesses, etc."

What I would like to know is how many of these cases were ever solved.

Jury Fraud, A Threat or Not?

Cornelia "Libby" Winslow is a novelist and the protagonist in Laura Van Wormer's 1995 novel, Jury Duty (Crown Publishing). Libby is also juror number three and brings up an issue that has never crossed my mind and, unlike jury tampering, never gets reported on in the news--jury fraud.

After recently serving two days as a potential juror, her thoughts struck a chord with me: "Not once in this entire process had anyone ever asked her for an ID. For all they knew, Cornelia Winslow could have paid someone to show up at jury duty for her. Then she wondered what would happen if someone was found not guilty in a trial, only to find out later that one of the jurors had been an impostor. What happened then?"

At a time when many state and congressional legislators are clamoring about voter fraud and advocating that voters show photo ID before they are allowed to vote, this particular issue doesn't seem to be of any concern to them.

It would be interesting to learn if jury fraud has ever happened in the history of American jurisprudence. And if so, what were the consequences?

David Rothenberg, A Marathoner For Gays And Ex-Offenders

David Rothenberg, the openly gay founder and executive director of the New York-based Fortune Society, a self-help organization for ex-cons, was praised in Village Voice writer Jack Newfield's annual honor roll as "a marathoner for two of this city's most discriminated-against minorities--ex-prison inmates, and gays and lesbians." Many of Rothenberg's constituents could fall into both categories quite easily. And, in this society, to be black, gay, and an ex-con is to be triply stigmatized, triply persecuted.

The Fortune Society, says Rothenberg, reflects the population of the prisons, 80 percent black and Hispanic. Each year nearly 2,500 ex-inmates cross the Fortune Society's threshold in order to utilize its services: a job placement unit, a vocational training and educational program, and a juvenile unit, all run by a staff of 26 persons.

Rothenberg, 53, who grew up in middle-class comfort in New Jersey, and gave up a lucrative career as a Broadway press agent to run Fortune, has, writes Newfield, "continued to explain the casual relationship between crime and poverty."

Charles Michael Smith: Are prisons as they exist today anachronisms?
David Rothenberg: Yes, of course, they are anachronisms. But because they're old isn't why they're bad. They're bad because they don't work. The word "penitentiary" comes from [the word] "penitence." The idea of the penitentiary began with the Quakers who thought that if people had done bad or evil things, you lock them away. Then they would contemplate what they did. They would come out and be better. We've never really changed that concept. They don't become better, they become acclimated to that unnatural surrounding.

CMS: You've made the statement that there are bad acts, not bad people.
DR: I say that because i don't know who is to judge and rule out people from coming back into society. We have people who have come to the Fortune Society who have all the labels--beyond help, beyond redemption, incorrigible, career criminal--all of those labels that have been imposed on them by society. In a support system we've watched them change and grow, accept themselves and what they can do in society. Most of the people that work here are people who were written off by society at one point.

CMS: What about the relationship of poverty to crime?
DR: There are many poor people who don't commit crime. It's not the poorness, per se, that causes it but it creates the situation of child abuse, of neglect, of rage, of hunger, of denial, of resentment. Those are all the ingredients that work together. If you go through the prisons and you talk to people who are doing time there, you'll find out that overwhelmingly they are poor people. Which has a lot to do with the cost of justice as well. Street crime and person-to-person crime gets more severe punishment. That tends to be poor people. Whereas, what is called white collar crime tends to be more white people, more middle class and wealthy people. The reason for that is poor people don't have access to the books to do the embezzlement. A lot of our guys couldn't forge checks because they can't write. So they steal or what they mostly do is sell drugs.

CMS: Where do you stand on the death penalty issue?
DR: I'm one of the most consistent and frequent spokespersons against the death penalty. The simple fact is that 99.9 percent of the crimes that take place, the death penalty wouldn't be an issue. In fact, when people commit violent, horrible crimes, they are irrational, violent acts. To think that a logical deterrent which would affect reasonably thinking people is going to deter the irrational is absurd. If you're really offended by murder, then you can't be in favor of the government being in the business. If people are really concerned about reducing victims, we should spend a little more energy on gun control and the manufacture of guns. That's the real issue.

This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Native in ca. 1985 or 1986.

White Activists Fighting For Puerto Rican Independence

Bob Lederer, a gay activist involved in the white anti-imperialist movement, faces imprisonment if he refuses to testify before a federal grand jury investigating, among other things, a series of 1983 bombings of federal buildings by revolutionary groups.

Lederer, who is employed as a legal secretary, is media coordinator of the New Movement in Solidarity  with Puerto Rican Independence and Socialism, a group of white North American supporters of Puerto Rican national liberation.

On March 27, 1985, four men whom Lederer assumed to be FBI agents served him with a subpoena at his place of work. "The one who handed the subpoena," says Lederer, "whipped out his FBI badge. He didn't introduce the other three. They might been FBI, they might have been NYPD [working with the FBI as part of the Joint Terrorist Task Force].

The subpoena ordered Lederer to come to Washington, D.C. May 2 [1985] to tell what he knows about the anti-imperialist movement in the U.S. The grand jury is investigating the November 1983 bombing of the Capitol building, shortly after the invasion of [the Caribbean island of] Grenada , as well as earlier bombings that year that involved military targets, among them a computer center. Two groups, the Red Guerilla Resistance and the Armed Resistance Unit, claimed responsibility for those attacks.

Four activists, current and former members of the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee (Steven Burke, Julie Nalibov, Christine Rico, and Sandra Roland), are already serving time for being grand jury resisters in this matter. They have voiced support for the bombings but deny any knowledge of the groups behind them. In a joint statement, they announced that they "send our love to Terry Bisson [an Anti-Klan member also subpoenaed March 27] and Bob Lederer who are continuing the struggle as grand jury resistors.[sic]."

Lederer whose work in the Puerto Rican movement has made him a target for government surveillance, plans to refuse to testify. He says: "Grand juries are a tool that's completely under the control of the prosecutor. There's no right to have a lawyer there. When it's a political grand jury investigating a political movement, I believe it's an absolutely essential thing for any person who has any kind of awareness of what this country does, what it stands for, how the FBI has been used over the years, can never give any information no matter how innocuous they think it is, no matter how much they quote unquote don't know anything. Because in  political case, when the FBI says its investigating an activity by an underground movement, anything they can get from you, even if it's saying you don't know, that you know certain people but not other people, that helps them to complete a very sophisticated computer profile that they've been building about every person in the movement."

The 30-year-old activist vows that he will "never cooperate with the FBI. They don't have the legal power to subpoena people so they use this rubber stamp relationship between prosecutors and grand juries, to virtually get subpoena power without legally [having] it."

His refusal will lead to either of two consequences: civil contempt or criminal contempt. Lederer explains the terms: "The theory behind [civil contempt] is that you are being held not as punishment but as a coercive measure with the hope that the time that you are in jail they will put so much pressure on you from how unpleasant it is that you'll change your mind and agree to testify. And then you're immediately released if you agree to answer all of the questions. If you then balk and say 'I'll answer some but not others,' then you'll be right back in jail. Criminal contempt is an acknowledgment by the government that this person has made it clear from their political stance that they will never, ever testify. You can put them in jail for 10 years and they wouldn't testify. So instead of the idea of 'We're trying to put pressure on them,' it's openly saying 'We're punishing them for not testifying.' You get charged with a felony called criminal contempt. You have a trial which is a farce because the only issue in the trial is: Did you or did you not follow the judge;s order to testify?"

A civil contempt charge would mean that a resister would remain in jail for the duration of the grand jury's term of 18 months. It is conceivable, says Lederer, for another grand jury to be called and, if the resister still refuses to talk, stay in jail an additional 18 months. A jail term for criminal contempt, on the other hand, would be indefinite, which would include a possible life sentence, if the judge wanted it that way, explains Lederer.

The product of what he describes as "a comfortable white middle class \" family, Lederer, who grew up in Wheaton, Maryland, became politically active during his students days at the University of Maryland. "My college experiences s opened my eyes beyond this attitude that America is great because they welcomed part of my family as Jews into the mainstream which is true, they did." But, he continues, "When I began meeting [African-American] people and African people" that was when "I understood that things are not so nice and comfortable for the majority of people in the world, thanks to the role of the United States in [their] exploitation."

This is an excerpt from an article that was published in the New York Native in 1985.