The Death Penalty Information Center reports that 144 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973. “The Innocence List,” Death Penalty Information Center, available at deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-list-those-freed-death-row, accessed April 25, 2014.
9 Hundreds more have been released … According to the Innocence Project, there have been 316 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. Eighteen of the exonerated prisoners spent time on death row. “DNA Exonerations Nationwide,” The Innocence Project, available at innocenceproject.org/Content/DNA_Exonerations_Nationwide.php, accessed April 25, 2014.
10 Presumptions of guilt, poverty, racial bias … John Lewis and Bryan Stevenson, “State of Equality and Justice in America: The Presumption of Guilt,” Washington Post (May 17, 2013).
11 Spending on jails and prisons … In 2010, the latest year for which statistics are currently available, the cost of incarceration in America was about $80 billion. Attorney General Eric Holder, American Bar Association Speech (August 12, 2013); Tracey Kyckelhahn and Tara Martin, Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts, 2010–Preliminary” (July 2013), available at bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4679, accessed April 30, 2014. By comparison, that figure was about $6.9 billion in 1980. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Justice Expenditure and Employment Extracts—1980 and 1981 Data from the Annual General Finance and Employment Surveys” (March 1985), available at bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=3527, accessed April 30, 2014.
CHAPTER ONE: MOCKINGBIRD PLAYERS
1 Thirteen of the state’s sixteen pulp and paper mills … Conner Bailey, Peter Sinclair, John Bliss, and Karni Perez, “Segmented Labor Markets in Alabama’s Pulp and Paper Industry,” Rural Sociology 61, no. 3 (1996): 475–96.
2 “The evil tendency of the crime”… Pace & Cox v. State, 69 Ala. 231, 233 (1882).
3 The State of Idaho banned interracial marriage … U.S. Census Office, Fourteenth Census of Population (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1920).
4 It wasn’t until 1967 … When the Virginia legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924, authorizing the forced sterilization of black women thought to be defective or dangerous and criminalizing marriage between a black person and white person, people in Caroline County took these pronouncements very seriously. Decades later, when a young white man, Richard Loving, fell in love with a black woman named Mildred Jeter, the young couple decided to get married after learning that Mildred was pregnant. They went to Washington, D.C., to “get legal,” knowing that it wouldn’t be possible in Virginia. They tried to stay away but got homesick and returned to Caroline County after the wedding to be near their families. Word about the marriage got out, and some weeks later the sheriff and several armed deputies stormed into their home in the middle of the night to arrest Richard and Mildred for miscegenation. Jailed and humiliated, they were forced to plead guilty and were told that they should be grateful that their prison sentences would be suspended as long as they agreed to leave the county and not return for “at least twenty-five years.” They fled the state again but this time decided to fight the law in court with a lawsuit filed with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1967, after years of defeats in lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down miscegenation laws, declaring them unconstitutional.
5 “The legislature shall never pass any law”… Even though the restriction could not be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had the votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent supported a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent opposed such a ban, and 14 percent were undecided.
6 Nearly a dozen people had been lynched … The names of the people lynched are as follows: October 13, 1892: Burrell Jones, Moses Jones/Johnson, Jim Packard, and one unknown (brother of Jim Packard). Tuskegee University, “Record of Lynchings in Alabama from 1871 to 1920,” compiled for the Alabama Department of Archives and History by the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Alabama Dept. of Archives and History Digital Collections, available at digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/2516, accesssed September 18, 2009; also, “Four Negroes Lynched,” New York Times (October 14, 1892); Stewart Tolnay, compiler, “NAACP Lynching Records,” Historical American Lynching Data Collection Project, available at people.uncw.edu/hinese/HAL/HAL%20Web%20Page.htm#Project%20HAL, accessed April 30, 2014.
October 30, 1892: Allen Parker. Tuskegee University Archives; Tolnay, “NAACP Lynching Records.”
August 30, 1897: Jack Pharr. Tuskegee University Archives; Tolnay, “NAACP Lynching Records.”
September 2, 1897: Unknown. Tuskegee University Archives.
August 23, 1905: Oliver Latt. Tuskegee University Archives.