United States: a black teenager cleared of a murder 91 years after his execution – Le Figaro

He had been sentenced to death and executed at 16 for murder: 91 years later, a court in Pennsylvania, in the eastern United States, this week recognized the innocence of Alexander McClay Williams, giving justice to this African-American and his only surviving 92-year-old sister. To read alsoDeath penalty: executioner in France, story of a taboo job SEE ALSO – “The death penalty is a shame for humanity”, denounces Robert Badinter “I’m just happy that it ends as it should have start, ”said Susie Williams-Carter, the teenager’s sister, quoted by The Philadelphia Inquirer on Thursday. “We knew he was innocent, now we want everyone to know.” “We cannot rewrite history. (…) But when justice can be done by publicly acknowledging such an error, we must seize the opportunity”, declared, for his part, the district attorney of Delaware, Pennsylvania, Jack Stollsteimer. The prosecutor spoke in a press release following the dismissal of the case by a county judge on Monday, in favor of Alexander McClay Williams, after years of proceedings. Read alsoWar in Ukraine: a pro-Russian separatist leader does not want to change the sentence of foreigners sentenced to death SEE ALSO – Can a presumed innocent man be tried in a glass cage? White jury “This decision is the recognition that the charges against him should never have been”, added the prosecutor, recalling that the teenager, executed on February 27, 1931, remained the youngest boy of the history of this state to suffer the death penalty. On October 3, 1930, the husband of Vida Robare, a white head of the Glen Mills School for Boys, a detention center for young offenders, had found the body of his wife, “brutally murdered” in his chalet, in the compound of the establishment, recalls the prosecutor’s office. Quickly charged, 16-year-old Alexander McClay Williams, who was serving a sentence in the facility, had signed confessions three times during five interrogations without the presence of a lawyer or a relative, “despite the absence of witnesses eye or direct evidence”, adds the same source. Read alsoBurma to carry out its first executions since 1990 His later appointed lawyer, William Ridley, the county bar’s first African-American, had no resources to prepare for trial and “the defendant faced a all-white jury, which found him guilty in less than four hours, ”continues the prosecutor’s office. Jack Stollsteimer pays tribute to the “relentless, for years” work of the boy’s sister and the lawyer’s great-grandson to show “the inconsistencies” of the file, as elements that can exculpate the accused but yet ignored. The prosecutor cites this “bloody handprint of an adult male found near the door to the crime scene, photographed by the police” but “never mentioned at trial”. Or the existence of another suspect, the former husband of Vida Robare, from whom she had obtained a divorce “for” extreme cruelty “” SEE ALSO – War in Ukraine: the UN “shocked” by “the magnitude illegal executions”