Cellos Harrison was an African American man in Marianna, Florida who was lynched on June 16, 1943 after being rearrested when his murder conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Florida because his confession was obtained under duress. [1] He was twice convicted by an all-white jury of murdering a white man who was working as a gas station attendant and store clerk. State and federal investigations were launched into the lynching but no one was ever indicted or convicted. [2] A decade earlier Claude Neal was lynched in Marianna. [3] The area was also wrought by a wave of violence against African Americans and Republicans during the Reconstruction Era after the American Civil War in what is known as the Jackson County War.
Harrison, a farm worker, was convicted of killing gas station attendant Johnnie Mayo in 1940. [4] His conviction was overturned when his confession was thrown out on appeal. Cellos was reindicted and then taken from the Jackson County, Florida jail by four masked men and killed by a blow or blows to the head. His body was found 5 miles outside Marianna. [5]
NAACP lawyer Harry T. Moore, who was later assassinated in a 1951 bombing of his home, wrote a letter to Florida governor Spessard Holland calling for an investigation and one was ordered. [6]
Tameka Bradley Hobbs wrote about this and three other lynchings in her 2015 book Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida . [7] [5]
Jackson County is a county located in the U.S. state of Florida, on its northwestern border with Alabama. As of the 2020 census, the population was 47,319. Its county seat is Marianna.
Marianna is a city in and the county seat of Jackson County, Florida, United States, and it is home to Chipola College. The official nickname of Marianna is "The City of Southern Charm". The population was 6,245 at the 2020 census.
Donald Marshall Jr. was a Mi'kmaq man who was wrongly convicted of murder. The case inspired a number of questions about the fairness of the Canadian justice system, especially given that Marshall was Aboriginal; as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation put it, "The name Donald Marshall is almost synonymous with 'wrongful conviction' and the fight for native justice in Canada." The case inspired the Michael Harris book, Justice Denied: The Law Versus Donald Marshall and the subsequent film Justice Denied. His father, Donald Marshall Sr., was grand chief of the Mi'kmaq Nation at the time.
Moore et al. v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled 6–2 that the defendants' mob-dominated trials deprived them of due process guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reversed the district court's decision declining the petitioners' writ of habeas corpus. This case was a precedent for the Supreme Court's review of state criminal trials in terms of their compliance with the Bill of Rights.
Gene Miller (1928–2005) was a longtime investigative reporter at the Miami Herald who won two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting that helped save innocent men on Florida's Death Row from execution. He was also a legendary editor, mentoring generations of young reporters in how to write crisp, direct, and entertaining stories. When he died of cancer in 2005, the Herald called him "the soul and the conscience of our newsroom."
The Groveland Four were four African American men, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping a white woman and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Florida. The oldest, Thomas, tried to elude capture and was killed that month. The others were put on trial. Shepard and Irvin received death sentences, and Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. The events of the case led to serious questions about the arrests, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment, and the unusual sentencing following their convictions. Their incarceration was exacerbated by their systemic and unlawful treatment—including the death of Shepherd, and the near-fatal shooting of Irvin. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and Irvin in 1968. All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2021.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Edwin Porch Morrow was an American politician, who served as the 40th Governor of Kentucky from 1919 to 1923. He was the only Republican elected to this office between 1907 and 1927. He championed the typical Republican causes of his day, namely equal rights for African-Americans and the use of force to quell violence. Morrow had been schooled in his party's principles by his father, Thomas Z. Morrow, who was its candidate for governor in 1883, and his uncle, William O. Bradley, who was elected governor in 1895. Both men were founding members of the Republican Party in Kentucky.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
The Moore's Ford lynchings, also known as the 1946 Georgia lynching, refers to the July 25, 1946, murders of four young African Americans by a mob of white men. Tradition says that the murders were committed on Moore's Ford Bridge in Walton and Oconee counties between Monroe and Watkinsville, but the four victims, two married couples, were shot and killed on a nearby dirt road.
Omar Bradley is an American politician who served as mayor of Compton, California from 1993 until 2001.
Mr. Big is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases. Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang, they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.
Pitts and Lee v. Florida (1963) was a criminal case in which two African-American defendants were charged with murder. The case is remembered for its Civil Rights implications, and because it involved two death-row inmates who were later exonerated. The prosecutors deliberately tampered with evidence, and the men were sentenced to death by an all-white jury, Freddie Lee Pitts and Wilbert Lee were imprisoned for twelve years before being pardoned by then-Florida Governor Reubin Askew on September 20, 1975.
Claude Neal was a 23-year-old African-American farmhand who was arrested in Jackson County, Florida, on October 19, 1934, for allegedly raping and killing Lola Cannady, a 19-year-old white woman missing since the preceding night. Circumstantial evidence was collected against him, but nothing directly linked him to the crime. When the news got out about his arrest, white lynch mobs began to form. In order to keep Neal safe, County Sheriff Flake Chambliss moved him between multiple jails, including the county jail at Brewton, Alabama, 100 miles (160 km) away. But a lynch mob of about 100 white men from Jackson County heard where he was, and brought him back to Jackson County.
Willie James Howard was a 15-year-old African-American living in Live Oak, Suwannee County, Florida. He was drowned for having given Christmas cards to all his co-workers at the Van Priest Dime Store, including Cynthia Goff, a white girl, followed by a letter to her on New Year's Day.
Sessions v. Dimaya, 584 U.S. 148 (2018), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that 18 U.S.C. § 16(b), a statute defining certain "aggravated felonies" for immigration purposes, is unconstitutionally vague. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) classifies some categories of crimes as "aggravated felonies", and immigrants convicted of those crimes, including those legally present in the United States, are almost certain to be deported. Those categories include "crimes of violence", which are defined by the "elements clause" and the "residual clause". The Court struck down the "residual clause", which classified every felony that, "by its nature, involves a substantial risk" of "physical force against the person or property" as an aggravated felony.
Democracy Abroad, Lynching At Home: Racial Violence In Florida is a 2015 history book by Tameka Bradley Hobbs that discusses how lynchings have changed in the United States, with a focus on the mid 20th century Florida lynchings of Arthur C. Williams, Cellos Harrison, Willie James Howard, and Jesse James Payne. The book won a 2015 Bronze Florida Book Award and the 2016 Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award from the Florida Historical Society.
Tameka Bradley Hobbs is a historian, educator, author, and activist. She currently serves as the Library Regional Manager of Broward County Library's African American Research Library and Cultural Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She previously served as associate provost of Florida Memorial University and the founding director of the FMU Social Justice Institute think tank and research center. She is the author of the 2015 history book Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida.