Family of Black teenager wrongly executed by Delaware County in 1931 seeks damages after exoneration in 2022 – Delco Times

Sam Lemon, right, speaks at a news conference with Susie Williams Carter, center, and attorney Michael Pomerantz, in Philadelphia. Carter is the sister of the youngest person ever executed in Pennsylvania, 16-year-old Alexander McClay Williams, and Lemon is the great-grandson of the attorney who represented him. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

By MARYCLAIRE DALE
AP Legal Affairs Editor

PHILADELPHIA — The family of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania — a 16-year-old black boy sent to the electric chair in 1931 and exonerated by the governor in 2022 — is suing Delaware County, which prosecuted him .

Alexander McClay Williams was convicted of murder in the October 1930 ice stabbing of a white woman in his cottage on the grounds of his reform school.

Vida Robare, 34, was stabbed 47 times.

Her ex-husband, who also worked at the school, said he found the body, and a photograph of an adult's bloody handprint, taken at the scene, was examined by two fingerprint experts. But this was not mentioned during the trial, nor was the fact that she obtained the divorce on the grounds of “extreme cruelty”.

Williams, 5 feet 5 inches tall and 125 pounds, quickly became a suspect, even though his hands were smaller, there were no eyewitnesses and no evidence linking him to the crime. He was held for days of interrogation without his parents or a lawyer, and eventually signed three confessions, researchers found.

He was convicted by an all-white jury on January 7, 1931, and executed five months later on June 8.

“They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, 94, of Chester, the last surviving sister of a family of 13 children, said at a news conference. “They must pay for killing my brother.”

She was only about a year old at the time and her devastated parents didn't talk about it much. They ran a boarding house in Coatesville, but abandoned the business and left town as the scandal attracted national attention, she said.

“This tragedy has haunted the family, has haunted the parents, has haunted Susie, has haunted (trial attorney) William Ridley and his family,” said Philadelphia attorney Joseph Marrone, who filed a petition Friday. federal complaint against Delaware County and the estates of two detectives and a man. prosecutor who prosecuted the case.

“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient black boy in the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” Marrone said.

Gov. Tom Wolf apologized on behalf of Pennsylvania when he exonerated Williams and called his execution a “grave miscarriage of justice.” District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said the teen's constitutional rights were violated and a Delaware County judge overturned the conviction.

Williams had been sent to Glen Mills School for Boys for starting a fire that destroyed a barn, Carter said. The 193-year-old school closed in 2019 after a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation into decades-long allegations of child abuse.

Author and educator Samuel Lemon had known about the case since he was a child, as Williams had been defended at trial by his great-grandfather, William H. Ridley. At the time, the only black attorney in Delaware County, Ridley was paid $10 for the trial, with no support for investigators or experts. He faces a team of 15 people.

Lemon researched the case, tracked down the 300-page trial transcript and found problems with the evidence, including documents showing Williams' age was incorrectly listed as 18, not 16 , as well as the husband's history of abuse.

“As I peeled back the layers, it became clear to me that Alexander McClay Williams was innocent,” Lemon said. “It was a kind of legal lynching.”

Carter said the truth about his brother may never have been known without the work of Lemon and others.

“My mom kept saying, ‘Alex didn’t do that. He could never have done that. She was right. But it affected us all,” she said.

Osceola Perdue, a 57-year-old niece of Alexander Williams, said the story pained her when she heard about it and still resonates today.

“It was profound because, if you think about it, it still continues today. You get stopped by the police, you get scared to death, even me as a woman,” Perdue said. “I still go back to my uncle, thinking about how he felt… It still happens. It doesn't stop.

The Williams family, Marrone said, has the same right to seek damages as more recent exonerees, nine of whom, all black men, joined the family at the podium Monday. Exonerees Jimmy Dennis and Michael White of Philadelphia said there should be “collective outrage” over the way innocent people are treated by police, prosecutors and others in the justice system, whether today today or a century ago.

“We are deeply disgusted by the state's behavior, but it is emblematic of what we have also experienced. So we came here today to stand with the family and defend what we consider our little brother,” Dennis said. who was awarded $16 million by a jury last month after spending 25 years on death row, the largest exoneration verdict in Philadelphia history.