Posthumous Pardons

[fuzzywuzzy]

She recanted her statment in 1933 and they still served sentences? That's insane!!! And it's almost like 'well it doesn't matter if a person doesn't get justice during their life time because you can just pardon them after death .........like a posthumous medal or something. disgusting!

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/22/us/wi ... ml?hp&_r=0

The men were among the group of nine teenagers who were first tried in April 1931 after a fight between blacks and whites aboard a train passing through Jackson County, in Alabama’s northeastern corner, led to allegations of sexual assault. Within weeks of the reported rapes, an Alabama judge had sentenced eight of them to death following their convictions by all-white juries. The trial of the youngest defendant, Roy Wright, ended in a hung jury amid a dispute about whether he should be executed, and he was never retried.

The United States Supreme Court intervened the following year, setting off a long stretch of additional appeals and trials, including one in 1933 where Ruby Bates, one of the accusers, recanted her story.

Prosecutors dropped the rape charges against five of the men in July 1937, but four others — including those pardoned on Thursday — were convicted again and initially sentenced to death or decades in prison.

State officials ultimately agreed to release three of them on parole, including Clarence Norris, who was pardoned by Gov. George Wallace in 1976. Mr. Patterson escaped from prison and fled to Michigan.