Leo Frank Case | New Georgia Encyclopedia
Posted By admin on May 12, 2015
The Leo Frank case is one of the most notorious and highly publicized cases in the legal annals of Georgia. A Jewish man in Atlanta was placed on trial and convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for the National Pencil Company, which he managed. Before the lynching of Frank two years later, the case became known throughout the nation. The degree of anti-Semitism involved in Frank's conviction and subsequent lynching is difficult to assess, but it was enough of a factor to have inspired Jews, and others, throughout the country to protest the conviction of an innocent man. The Murder
OnApril 26, 1913, Mary Phagan, the child of tenant farmers who had moved to Atlanta for financial gain, went to the pencil factory to pick up her $1.20 pay for the twelve hours she had worked that week. Leo Frank, the superintendent of the factory, paid her. He was the last person to acknowledge having seen Phagan alive. In the middle of the night the factory watchman found her bruised and bloodied body in the cellar and called the police. The city was aghast when it heard the news. A young factory girl had been brutally murdered; rumors spread that she had been sexually assaulted before her death. The public demanded quick action and swift justice.
On the basis of this evidence Frank was arrested. The police thereafter collected more "evidence" before deciding to put Frank on trial. The state's main witness, Jim Conley, a black janitor who was arrested when he was seen washing red stains from a shirt, later gave at least four contradictory affidavits explaining how he had helped Frank dispose of the body.
Atlantans hoped for a conviction. They surrounded the courthouse, cheered the prosecutor as he entered and exited the building each day, and celebrated wildly when the jurors, after twenty-five days of trial, found Frank guilty.
Within weeks of the trial's outcome in early September, friends of Frank sought assistance from northern Jews, including constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall of the American Jewish Committee. Marshall gave advice about what information to include in the appeal, but Frank's Georgia attorneys ignored his counsel. Frank's lawyers filed three successive appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court and two more to the U.S. Supreme Court, all on such procedural issues as Frank's absence when the verdict was rendered and the excessive amount of public influence placed on the jury. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court, still on procedural grounds, overturned Frank's appeals; however, a minority of two, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes, dissented. They noted that the trial was conducted in an atmosphere of public hostility: "Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury."
Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, visited the pencil factory where the murder had taken place, and finally decided that Frank was innocent. He commuted the sentence, however, to life imprisonment, assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free.
Slaton's decision enraged much of the Georgia populace, leading to riots throughout Atlanta, as well as a march to the governor's mansion by some of his more virulent opponents. The governor declared martial law and called out the National Guard. When Slaton's term as governor ended a few days later, police escorted him to the railroad station, where he and his wife boarded a train and left the state, not to return for a decade.
The Frank case not only was a miscarriage of justice but also symbolized many of the South's fears at that time. Workers resented being exploited by northern factory owners who had come south to reorganize a declining agrarian economy. Frank's Jewish identity compounded southern resentment toward him, as latent anti-Semitic sentiments, inflamed by Tom Watson, became more pronounced. Editorials and commentaries in newspapers all over the United States supporting a new trial for Frank and/or claiming his innocence reinforced the beliefs of many outraged Georgians, who saw in them the attempt of Jews to use their money and influence to undermine justice.
In 1986 the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank, stating:
Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the State's failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the State's failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, in compliance with its Constitutional and statutory authority, hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a Pardon.
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Leo Frank Case | New Georgia Encyclopedia
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