Alexander McClay Williams was charged at the age of 16 and executed for a murder he did not commit. The truth was restored by a Pennsylvania court in the eastern United States.
He was sentenced to death and executed at the age of 16 for murder: 91 years later, a Pennsylvania court in the eastern United States this week acknowledged the innocence of Alexander McClay Williams, acquitting this African-American and his only surviving sister. and is 92 years old.
“I’m just happy it’s ending as it should have started,” said Susie Williams-Carter, the teen’s sister, quoted by The Philadelphia Inquirer. “We knew he was innocent, now we want everyone to know.”
“We can not rewrite history. But when justice can be done by publicly acknowledging such a mistake, we must seize the opportunity,” said Jack Stolstheimer, Delaware County, Pennsylvania attorney general.
The prosecutor said the above in a statement after the acquittal was announced on Monday by a county judge in favor of Alexander McClay Williams, after years of litigation.
White jurors
“This decision is a recognition that the charges against him should never have been brought,” the prosecutor added, recalling that the teenager, who was killed on February 27, 1931, went down in state history as the youngest boy to be executed since he was sentenced to the last sentence.
On October 3, 1930, Vida Robare’s husband, a white man in charge of the Glen Mills School for Boys, a juvenile detention center, found the body of his wife, who had been “brutally murdered” inside her wooden house in of the institution, reminds the prosecutor’s office.
Alexander McClay Williams, 16, who was serving a sentence at the detention center, was quickly charged with murder. He had signed confessions three times during five interrogations without the presence of a lawyer or a relative “despite the absence of eyewitnesses or direct evidence,” the source added.
His later-appointed lawyer, William Ridley, the county’s first African-American lawyer, did not have the means to prepare for the trial, and the “accused” was confronted by a panel of jurors who were all white. guilty in less than four hours “, continues the prosecutor’s office.
Jack Stolstheimer pays tribute to the “incessant, chronic” work of the boy’s sister and the lawyer’s great-grandson to show the “inconsistencies” of the case, as evidence that could have acquitted the defendant but was ignored.
The prosecutor referred to the “bloody handprint of an adult man who was found near the door of the crime scene and was photographed by the police” but “was never mentioned in the trial”. Or the existence of another suspect, Vida Robare’s ex-husband, from whom she had divorced “for ‘extreme savagery'”.
