{"id":32798,"date":"2022-06-15T10:06:34","date_gmt":"2022-06-15T10:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/?p=32798"},"modified":"2022-06-15T10:06:34","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T10:06:34","slug":"after-91-years-the-murder-conviction-of-a-delaware-county-teen-has-been-overturned","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/2022\/06\/15\/after-91-years-the-murder-conviction-of-a-delaware-county-teen-has-been-overturned\/","title":{"rendered":"After 91 years, the murder conviction of a Delaware County teen has been overturned"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ad_1]<\/p>\n

\n

In 1931, an all-white jury took just four hours to convict Alexander McClay Williams, a Black teenager, in the stabbing death of a matron at the Glen Mills School for Boys in Delaware County.<\/p>\n

Five months later, Williams, 16, was executed, becoming the youngest person in Pennsylvania history to be put to death<\/a>. His family spent decades trying to prove his innocence, and this week \u2014 with help from the great-grandson of the lawyer who represented him at trial \u2014 Williams was posthumously vindicated.<\/p>\n

A Delaware County judge overturned his conviction for a crime prosecutors now say he did not commit.<\/p>\n

The ruling, handed down Monday in the same courtroom where Williams had been convicted 91 years ago, was met with thunderous applause from his relatives, including his only surviving sibling, Susie Williams-Carter.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just happy that it finally turned out the way it should have in the beginning,\u201d Williams-Carter, 92, told The Inquirer. \u201cWe just wanted it overturned, because we knew he was innocent, and now we want everyone else to know it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Sam Lemon, it was a victory that also honored his great-grandfather, William Ridley, the county\u2019s first Black attorney, who was given just $10 and a few weeks to make a case that Williams did not kill Vida Robare, a white matron at Glen Mills who was found dead inside a cabin at the school. She had been stabbed 47 times with an ice pick, two of her ribs were broken, and her eye was fractured.<\/p>\n

Robare\u2019s ex-husband, who had a history of domestic violence against her, called police to report finding her dead. He was the last person to be seen with her, court records show, but was quickly ruled out as the killer. Suspicion fell on Williams, a teen who had been sent to Glen Mills after committing crimes that included setting a fire that destroyed a barn and caused $25,000 in damage, and burglarizing a post office at the age of 12.<\/p>\n

Judge W. Roger Fronefield had sentenced Williams to an indeterminate stay at Glen Mills, a facility that Lemon said was little more than a jail for children at the time. Four years later, the same judge would sentence Williams to death in Robare\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n

Lemon, now 70, spent many childhood summer afternoons with his grandmother, listening to stories about her father, Ridley, the lawyer. He became fascinated by Williams\u2019 case, a rare and troubling loss in his great-grandfather\u2019s legal career.<\/p>\n

\u00bb READ MORE: From 2015: “Keeping a justice fight alive”<\/a><\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

So about 30 years ago, Lemon, a college administrator who lives in Media, began digging into the case and discovered evidence that convinced him Williams was not guilty. For one thing, he said, prosecutors failed to introduce key evidence at trial, including a man\u2019s bloody handprint that was found at the scene. And Williams had been busy working elsewhere on the grounds at the time of Robare\u2019s death. To have committed the crime, Lemon said, the teen would have needed \u201cthe supernatural ability to stop time,\u201d attack the matron ,and return to his worksite.<\/p>\n

Lemon discovered this and other details as he pored over historical records, including a transcript of Williams\u2019 short trial in 1931. And he could not help but wonder whether race played a factor in the jury\u2019s decision to convict Williams in just a few hours.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was a stain on the court, a legal lynching in a sense, which is harsh thing to say, but that\u2019s what it was,\u201d Lemon said. \u201cPeople are looking now not just at classic civil rights cases from the South, but also cases in the North where race played a factor in these unjust sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n

About seven years ago, he hired attorney Robert Keller to help him try to get the case overturned.<\/p>\n

Last summer, Keller and Lemon met with District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer, hoping that he might take an interest in the case. Stollsteimer agreed to take a look and read the trial transcript during his summer vacation in Cape May.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just an alignment of the stars,\u201d Lemon said. \u201cThe right time, right place, and the right change in politics in our county.\u201d (Stollsteimer was the first Democrat to be elected district attorney in county history.)<\/p>\n

Stollsteimer brought the case to President Judge Kevin F. Kelly, who agreed to hear a joint motion from Stollsteimer and Keller to have the case reopened.<\/p>\n

In an interview Tuesday, Stollsteimer said several aspects of the prosecution troubled him. He cited \u201csubversions of due process rights,\u201d including what he called a \u201cbrowbeaten confession\u201d that the teen gave police after repeated interrogations without a lawyer or an adult present.<\/p>\n

It stunned Stollsteimer, he said, that Williams was sent to the electric chair just a few months after his conviction, without any appeal filed by his attorney.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the criminal justice system, we\u2019re in the business of making people\u2019s lives better. That\u2019s what we believe every day when we come to work,\u201d Stollsteimer said. \u201cBut as long as humans are involved in this process, there will be errors, so if we can identify issues and right those wrongs, it\u2019s in our interest to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

During a hearing Monday, the lawyers laid out three decades of research and asked that the judge overturn Williams\u2019 conviction.<\/p>\n

They were joined in that effort by Robare\u2019s great-grandniece, Theresa Smithers, who had done her own research and who testified from her home in Michigan that she believed Williams was not guilty.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know that Alexander did not commit the murder,\u201d Smithers said, calling the teen a \u201chandy scapegoat\u201d for prosecutors at the time.<\/p>\n

Kelly, on his final day as Delaware County\u2019s president judge, concluded that evidence withheld by prosecutors could have changed the outcome of the trial. He seemed particularly troubled by the bloody handprint.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn short, it appears with the imposition of his death sentence, Mr. Williams was legally abandoned by the court system and left to die at the hands of the state,\u201d Kelly said.<\/p>\n

He granted the request for a retrial, and Stollsteimer immediately withdrew the charges.<\/p>\n

In so doing, Lemon said, the judge and prosecutor righted a wrong that had wounded many people across multiple generations.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt feels astonishing,\u201d he said. \u201cIt feels like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I\u2019m not resentful in any way, but that was a huge burden to carry for so many years.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[ad_2]
\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ad_1] In 1931, an all-white jury took just four hours to convict Alexander McClay Williams,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32800,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32798\/revisions\/32800"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjstudents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}