1931 Wrongful Execution Exoneree's Family Seeks Damages

1931 Wrongful Execution Exoneree's Family Seeks Damages

Introduction

The family of the youngest person ever executed in Pennsylvania—a 16-year-old who was sent to the electric chair in 1931 and exonerated by the governor in 2022—is suing the county that prosecuted him.

The teenager was convicted of murder for the October 1930 icepick stabbing of a white woman in her cottage at his reform school. The victim, a 34-year-old woman, had been stabbed 47 times. Her ex-husband, who also worked at the school, found the body and reported it, but a photograph of an adult’s bloody handprint and evidence of her divorce due to "extreme cruelty" were not mentioned at the trial.

Despite his smaller hands, lack of eyewitnesses, and no evidence linking him to the crime, the accused quickly became a suspect. He was interrogated for days without his parents or a lawyer present and ultimately signed three confessions. Convicted by the jury on January 7, 1931, he was executed five months later, on June 8.

“They murdered him,” said the last surviving sibling of the family’s 13 children at a press conference. “They need to pay for killing my brother.” She was only a year old at the time, and her parents, devastated, abandoned their boarding house business and left town as the scandal garnered national attention.

“This tragedy haunted the family, haunted the parents, haunted the trial lawyer and his family,” said the family’s Philadelphia lawyer, who filed the federal lawsuit against Delaware County and the estates of two detectives and a prosecutor who pursued the case.

“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” the lawyer said. The governor apologized on behalf of Pennsylvania when he exonerated the accused, calling his execution “an egregious miscarriage of justice.” The District Attorney said the teen’s constitutional rights had been violated, and a Delaware County judge vacated the conviction.

The teenager had been sent to the Glen Mills School for Boys for starting a fire that burned down a barn. The 193-year-old school closed in 2019 after a Philadelphia Inquirer investigation into decades-long allegations of child abuse.

The family argues they have the same right to pursue damages as more recent exonerees. Exonerees from Philadelphia joined the family at the podium, calling for “collective outrage” over how innocent people are treated by police, prosecutors, and the justice system, whether today or a century ago.