A black teenager wrongly executed for the murder of a white woman in 1931. Now his family is filing a lawsuit to defend his name.

(CNN) — For 85 years, Susie Williams Carter believed her brother was guilty of the crime for which he was convicted and executed: the brutal murder of a white woman in a Pennsylvania youth detention center.

In 1931, Alexander McClay Williams became the youngest person executed in Pennsylvania, when his death sentence was carried out by electric chair at the age of 16.

Alexander was convicted of murdering Vida Robare, the principal of Glen Mills School, a youth detention center where he was held, located just outside Philadelphia.

Carter, who was one year old at the time of his brother's execution, told CNN that his family rarely spoke about Alexander because it was painful for his mother and father to relive the anguish and grief of his execution.

But in 2015, everything changed.

That's when Carter, the only living sister in a family of 13 children, was presented with evidence that changed the image she had of her brother for decades.

Now, more than 90 years after his execution, Carter and his family are suing the county for damages, alleging that Alexander was “wrongly arrested and subjected to the horrors of imprisonment, unjustly tried, wrongly convicted and finally executed in the electric chair for a prison sentence. crime he did not commit,” according to the lawsuit filed last week in the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania.

CNN has reached out to the prosecutor's office for comment on the lawsuit.

Carter, 94, told CNN she wanted to raise awareness that wrongful convictions continue to torment young people of color in the United States.

“I want them (the public) to realize that these things still happen,” Carter said. “Something should be done to stop this.”

“They made no effort to hide what they did”

On Oct. 3, 1930, Robare's body was discovered by her ex-husband Fred, who also worked at Glen Mills School, according to the complaint.

She “was stabbed 47 times with an ice pick and suffered two broken ribs and a fractured skull,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that maintains a large database of penalty cases. capital in the United States.

A local newspaper, The Chester Times, “reported that prosecutors and detectives looked through the ranks of Glenn Mills students and decided to question” Alexander, according to the complaint.

It is unclear why he was excluded from the group.

William Ridley, the first African American admitted to the Delaware County bar, represented Alexander at trial.

His great-grandson, Sam Lemon, told CNN that he had been fascinated by Ridley's pioneering career since he was a child. So much so that he lives in Ridley's house in Media, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles from Philadelphia.

“I wanted to know why he (Ridley) lost probably the most important case of his entire legal career? » said Citron. “It was a bit of a debt of honor, trying to understand why and (find) a way to see if I could explain this to the Williams family or make things better.”

So in 1989, Lemon began writing letters, collecting documentation, and visiting the Philadelphia Historical Society to look at records on the case. He acquired death certificates and digested genealogy through ancestry records – all to better understand how Alexander was convicted.

During his research, Lemon found the prison doctor's 1930 death certificate and, he said, it looked like someone had altered the boy's age to say he was 18 when in reality he was 16.

“But they forgot to change the year of birth to make the calculations work,” Lemon said.

Lemon said he also noticed that the day she died was Oct. 3 and that an autopsy was performed the next day. Robare's cause of death was written in black ink: “puncture wounds to the heart,” according to a document in the family's complaint.

But someone, with what appears to be different handwriting, wrote in blue ink “caused by an ice pick in the hands of Alexander McClay Williams,” Lemon said.

But Alexander had not yet been condemned. The complaint also notes this discrepancy.

Reading the document made him nauseous, Lemon said.

“It made me physically ill; I thought I was going to have to find a trash can,” he said.

There were no eyewitnesses to the crime and no physical or forensic evidence linking Alexander to the murder, the complaint states.

A bloody handprint of an adult was found at the murder scene, but this evidence was not presented at trial and an officer later testified that he observed no blood on Alexander, according to the complaint.

But, Lemon said, it wasn't until he reviewed the original 300-page transcript of the trial that all the pieces fell into place.

“When I read that, it was just astounding,” he told CNN. “But what really surprised me was that they made no effort to hide what they had done.”

On the day of the murder, a school official asked Alexander and another boy to get shovels that were “a block or two away.” He then asked Alexander to run a separate errand — a task that the officer said took the boy 20 minutes, according to the complaint.

At trial, the Commonwealth argued that during those 20 minutes, Alexander committed the murder, according to the complaint.

Lemon said that in describing everything the teen was accused of doing in that short time, he counted 15 separate actions.

“That’s when I had the Eureka moment: It was impossible,” he said. “So I started doing these walking tests, time trials around my hometown in Media and measuring distances with my car and a stopwatch, and I realized that it was simply impossible. There was no way he could do all of these things in 20 minutes and then return to work without a trace of blood. »

After two decades of research, Lemon decided he had collected enough information to present his findings to Carter and his family.

He prepared a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation for the Williams family, who listened politely and quietly in the living room of a family home, he said, while revealing why he believed Alexander had been convicted wrongly.

“They were a little stunned because they didn’t know about this stuff,” Lemon said.

Lemon promised Carter and his family that he would help them clear Alexander's name.

“There was a lot of shame associated with the family on top of having to suffer in silence,” Lemon said. “I feel honored that these people took this stranger unexpectedly and trusted me, speaking about probably the most important family memory they had and extremely painful.”

“We cannot undo the past”

It took more than two weeks for Alexander to be appointed as an attorney, during which time he was questioned at least five times “without the presence of an attorney or parent,” according to the complaint.

Alexander initially denied any involvement, but eventually “confessed” to the crime three times, but the complaint alleges the confession was obtained under duress. At trial, Alexander “faced an all-white jury, which found him guilty in less than four hours,” according to a 2022 release from the county attorney’s office.

In 2017, the case against Alexander Williams was reopened thanks to legal advice from Lemon and attorney Robert Keller, who represented the teen posthumously in court as Lemon and the family sought to overturn his conviction.

In June 2022, a Delaware County Court of Common Pleas judge ordered a new trial and the Delaware County District Attorney's Office declined to bring the case.

The case was dismissed, “in recognition that the charges against him should never have been brought,” according to the prosecutor's office statement at the time.

“Unfortunately, we cannot undo the past,” prosecutor Jack Stollsteimer said in the statement. “We cannot rewrite history to erase the egregious wrongs of our ancestors. However, when, as here, justice can be done by publicly acknowledging such wrong, we must seize this opportunity.”

In October 2022 – more than 90 years after his death sentence – Alexander was exonerated by then-Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

More than 150 people were exonerated in the United States in 2023. Of these, almost 84% were people of color, almost 61% of the exonerees were black and are the most common exoneration factor. This was an official misconduct, according to data from the National Registry of Exonerations.

The Emmett Till Legacy Foundation, which honors the memory of the 14-year-old black boy who was kidnapped, brutally beaten and murdered in 1955 by two white men. after being accused of assaulting a white woman, offered a statement of support for the Williams family, saying it was inspired by their “long-standing and overdue quest for truth, justice and accountability.”

“No family should have to endure the type of historical and generational trauma that their family, ours and so many others have experienced for so long,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, this is an ongoing injustice that continues to impact us across the country today. »

Carter said she continued to fight to clear her brother's name — even after all this time — because she wants to raise awareness that what happened to him continues to happen to others.

She imagined her parents attending her brother's trial with great difficulty, hearing about the things Alexander was accused of, knowing that their son was innocent.

“And yet (the Commonwealth) let him die,” she said. “It’s a terrible thing to do to a family.”

CNN's Justin Gamble contributed to this report.