Illustration (doc. AFP PHOTO/MARK RALSTON)Washington DC - A black teenager in the United States who was executed in 1931 for the murder of a white woman was acquitted by a Pennsylvania court this week. The release decision follows ongoing lobbying by her only surviving sister.
As reported by AFP , Friday (06/17/2022), Alexander McClay Williams was only 16 years old when an all-white jury found him guilty of the 1930 murder of a white woman named Vida Robare. Williams was sentenced to death by a judge at the time.
He was executed a year later and made history as the youngest convict to be executed in the eastern US. However, 91 years later, a district judge dismissed the murder case and found Williams innocent.
"I'm just happy that it ended up being what it was meant to be from the start," Williams' sister, Susie Williams-Carter, was quoted as saying by the local Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday (16/6) local time.
"We just wanted it to be aborted because we knew he was innocent and now we want everyone to know that too," added 92-year-old Susie.
Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said in a statement that Williams' case was dismissed Monday, June 13, after years of litigation.
"This is an acknowledgment that charges against him should never have been filed," Stollsteimer said in a statement.
The case is the latest acknowledgment of historic racial injustices in the US legal system, which punished and in some cases executed innocent Americans, many of them black, in the century following the Civil War of 1861-1865.
In this murder case, according to Stollsteimer's statement, Williams who was a teenager was questioned by police five times without the presence of a lawyer or his parents. He also signed three confessional documents, despite the lack of eyewitnesses or direct evidence involving him.
Stollsteimer also noted that there was 'substantial' evidence that was ignored or not examined at the time. The evidence in question includes the bloody fingerprints of an adult male found near a door at the scene, which were photographed by police at the time but never discussed in court.
There is also the fact that the victim divorced her husband on charges of 'extreme cruelty' but the husband was never questioned as a suspect.
"We believe that the constitutional protections for this youth were violated in an irreparable way," Stollsteimer said.
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