Developed an innovative, mobile and lowcost system to detect the smallest traces of radiological and nuclear materials, offering cities worldwide a new tool to.Thank You for attending the 2017 Justice For All Ball and for your generous support for the mission of The Pro Bono Project.Whether you are a sponsor, individual.Archives and past articles from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Philly.The Trenton Six. The murder weapon was a soda pop bottle.It cracked the skull of 7.William Horner like an eggshell, spattering blood all over his junk shop at 2.N. Broad St. He was already dying in a back room, amid the used furniture and knickknacks, when the Trenton police got there.Up front, the old mans common law wife lay groaning, also clubbed over the head.She survived to tell cops the story.Some black men had come to the store, saying they wanted to buy a mattress and stove.Then came the brutal attack all for 5.What happened in that cluttered little shop on Jan.It turns out some of Hollywoods most grossly unrealistic characters were based on real people.Trentons most controversial whodunit the Trenton Six case.They were six African Americans on trial for murdering a white man.Guilty or innocent The question divided law and order men from civil rights crusaders, anti communists from liberals, blacks from whites.Around the world, the trial of the Trenton Six made headlines and stirred passions.On its outcome hinged not just six mens lives, but also, in the opinion of many, the very fairness of the American justice system.Law And Order Justice Is Served Cracked' title='Law And Order Justice Is Served Cracked' />Before there was a Trenton Six case, however, there was just confusion and fright.The police didnt even know how many men had committed the deadly robber.The dead mans wife, Elizabeth Horner, saw three.Another witness saw two light skinned black men walking away from the store in the minutes after the robbery.Yet another witness saw three black teenagers running toward a car, driven by a fourth man.The pressure was tremendous to solve the case.Even the normally sedate Trenton Evening Times cried bloody murder.On Jan. 2. 9, it ran an editorial, The Idle Death Chair, bemoaning the fact that New Jersey was going soft on snuffing out the lives of killers.Up and down Spring Street, Battle Monument and other black neighborhoods, police patrols pulled over black men for random questioning.On Feb. 6, they made a catch. Black Ghosts Full Moon Download Itunes . Fou3DQMPXXy7mAsHDp1NtaOegA=/fit-in/800x1000/filters:quality(95)/https://static.texastribune.org/media/images/2014/11/26/PannettiChamber_copy.jpg' alt='Law And Order Justice Is Served Cracked' title='Law And Order Justice Is Served Cracked' />His name was Collis English, and he was pulled over for driving his dads car without permission.The 2. 3 year old English disappeared into police custody for four days.When he finally emerged Feb.North Broad Street junkman.Charged along with English were five other men.One of them, 3. 5 year old Mc.Kinley Forrest, was a brother in law of English.He had come to police headquarters a few days earlier to find out why his friend was being held then he found himself under interrogation for the killing too.The rest of the Trenton Six were named in the confessions signed by Forrest and English.They were Ralph Cooper, 2.John Mc. Kenzie, 2.James Thorpe, 2. 4 and Horace Wilson, 4.All but Wilson ended up signing confessions, too.But there was something incredibly fishy about these confessions.You didnt have to be very smart to recognize what it was, said Ruth Rabstein, a lawyer who would later serve on the team defending English.It was a manufactured case.They had the wrong people, pure and simple.English, a Navy veteran with a rheumatic heart and mental slowness, quickly recanted.The confession was fake, he said, forced out of him by threats and being deprived of sleep for days on end.Hed had a record of babbling whatever someone wanted to hear.Some neighbor of his on Church Street once told me shed accused him of stealing pies off her windowsill, Rabstein said.He said he did it, but she later found out it was someone else entirely.And there was more, much more, that threw severe doubt onto the states case against the Trenton Six Mc.Kinley Forrest signed a confession to swinging the bottle that killed Horner.The cops also produced a receipt with his signed name, showing he had been in Horners store a week before.But Forrest was illiterate and marked his name with an X.Mrs. Horner failed to identify any of the Trenton Six at the station house, but she later IDd them from photos.Wilson was working on a Robbinsville potato farm the morning of the murder, and had work logs to prove it.Forrest, Mc. Kenzie and Cooper had alibis too.Thorpe had only one arm and that arm had been amputated because of a car accident eight days before the murder.No witnessed remembered anything so striking as a one armed man.The witness who saw a getaway by three teenagers described the escape car as a green Plymouth.Englishs car, the one police claimed was used in the robbery, was a black Ford.Nevertheless, the prosecution insisted the Trenton Six were guilty.So guilty, of so cold blooded a deed, that the death penalty was called for.The evidence was overwhelming, said Mercer County Prosecutor Mario Volpe, a passionate orator often talked about as a future candidate for governor.As for the denials of the confessions, the defendants actually agreed and planned to act crazy in order to produce or provide an avenue of escape, he said.An all white jury deliberated the case for 7 12 hours and came back with its verdict Aug.The judge immediately sentenced all six defendants to death in the electric chair.Off they went, to New Jersey State Prisons Death Row, and there they might have been electrocuted had it not been for Englishs sister, Bessie Mitchell.Mitchell, a New York City seamstress, saw the verdict as a gross miscarriage of justice and petitioned Trentons NAACP to raise money for an appeal.The local group declined, seeing it as an unpopular and losing case.So she turned to the Communist Party.God knows we couldnt be no worse off than we are now, she explained.The Communist Party, through its legal arm, the Civil Rights Congress, generated the publicity the Trenton Six needed.It printed a pamphlet on the case Lynching, Northern Style.The cover featured a cartoon of a judge looking on approvingly as six black man hanged from the bar of justice.Commentators around the world compared the Trenton Six to the Scottsboro Boys, a group of young black men in Alabama whod been convicted then cleared of a rape on the flimsiest of evidence.A paper in London headlined the Trenton story THEY MUST DIE FOR BEING BLACK.In 1. Trenton Six murder conviction was reversed by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which found that the jury had made a serious blunder it had never specified what degree of murder the men were guilty of.The judge had simply assumed first degree, and so sentenced the men to die.A new defense team would be led by George Pellettieri, and impassioned Trenton labor lawyer, and a battery of NAACP and civil rights attorneys from New York and Philadelphia.Ruth Rabstein was Pellettieris assistant counsel working on this case and many others together, they would fall in love and marry.The Communist Party quietly bowed out of the Trenton Six defense, Rabstein recalled.War in Korea and Joe Mc.Carthys Red hunting crusade were making life tough on the communists, and the Trenton Six would only suffer for the connection.We thought, we really did, that we had the chance to save the lives of some innocent people, said Rabstein, who is now 8.Princeton. The communists were diverting attention to make their own, political points.The new trial began in March 1.Every prosecution witness was met by a rebuttal witness every prosecution argument had a counter argument.The jury foreman in the second trial was Edward Kerr, a Trenton postal clerk and World War II veteran.He is now 7. 7 and vividly remembers being sequestered for 1.Hotel Hildebrecht, gaining a lot of flab from eating desserts that the petite women jurors refused.The jury Kerr served on was all white like the first one that had doomed the Trenton Six to die.But this time around, Kerr and his fellow jurors were troubled by the prosecutions case.They deliberated from evening until 6 a.Most jurors wanted to free at least some of the six, but couldnt agree on which ones.I didnt know how it ever got to be murder one, said Kerr, now of Hamilton.There were a lot of problems with the confessions.It was unfair to put all six of them away.Yet there was some circumstantial evidence that linked at least two of them to the crime scene.Kerr read the jurys compromise verdict on June 1.For English and Cooper, guilty, with a recommendation of mercy.For the remaining four of the Trenton Six not guilty.Whoops rang out through the courtroom.Yet the defense was not totally pleased.Pellettiteri immediately launched an appeal, noting that since the prosecution alleged all six men to be present at the time of the robbery, the jury could not find some of them innocent and some guilty.Then, fate intervened.
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