NORTH CAROLINA'S CAUSE CELEBRE
Spear, Sister Lois
WILMINGTON 10 NORTH CRROLiNA'S CAUSE CELEBRE In a speeeh televised Monday evening, January 23, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt reduced the prison sentences of the Wilmington 10, nine black...
...Turner...
...The governor's recent commutation will not lay the case to rest...
...WILMINGTON 10 NORTH CRROLiNA'S CAUSE CELEBRE In a speeeh televised Monday evening, January 23, North Carolina Governor James B. Hunt reduced the prison sentences of the Wilmington 10, nine black men and one white woman convicted of conspiracy to firebomb Mike's Grocery and to assault emergency personnel in racially troubled Wilmington in 1971...
...sister lois spear (Sister Lois Spear, a previous contributor, teaches History at St...
...Hall, described as a yo-yo by one policeman, discredited himself by making a series of recantations favoring first the prosecution and later the defense...
...It was his decision to send the case to the jury after calling only three defense witnesses, all of them supporters of Mrs...
...I felt some real affection for him...
...Supporters of the decision argued that, while prosecution witnesses had cast doubts on their believability, no corroborating witnesses backed up the changed testimony...
...The evidence that convicted Chavis and his followers, with the exception of the three witnesses who recanted, was entirely circumstantial...
...Without informing Defense Attorney James E. Ferguson II, who had built his case around their testimony, they quietly slipped out of Raleigh and returned to their Morristown, New Jersey, home...
...Supporters vow to take the case, not only to President Carter, but to the United Nations as well...
...The other two state witnesses swore that they gave perjured testimony in the original trial...
...But I never promised him anything...
...It's hard to understand how the case could have dragged on for so long...
...Two other black prosecution witnesses, Eric T. Junious and Jerome Mitchell, also recanted their earlier testimony with Junious charging that chief prosecuting attorney James (Jay) Stroud had given him a minibike in return for his testimony...
...Disclosure of improprieties by the prosecution—New Hanover County sheriffs deputies drove all the way to Asheville in the western mountains to bring Hall's girl friend to him when he became restless in coastal Wilmington where he was sequestered during the original trial—failed to convince the judge that the civil rights of the defendants had been violated...
...Within North Carolina an equally strange chain of events began to unfold...
...In a city where racial feelings were running so high that two men were killed in the crossfire between blacks and white vigilante groups, it is difficult to believe that 10 people could be separated from the mob and found guilty of "conspiracy" under a statute employed only once—to convict them...
...Last May, for example, the McLeods of Sanford were sentenced to six years in prison for torturing their children with live electric wires...
...Last May, Amnesty International, deciding that the human rights of the defendants had been violated, agreed to monitor the postconviction hearings in Burgaw, seat of the original trial (continuing racial tensions in Wilmington led to the change of venue...
...The publicity generated by these exposures gained for the Wilmington 10 a review of their convictions, but not the right to be present at the proceedings...
...One of their supporters, Angela Davis, an avowed Communist and member of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression, called the defendants "political prisoners," adding Commonweal: 103 that North Carolina has one of the worst prison systems in the country...
...memorial assembly...
...Yet, for an alleged conspiracy to firebomb a grocery, eight teenagers, a Vista worker and a young clergyman (Chavis was 22 at the time)—all with no previous prison records—drew a 17 February 1978:104 combined total of 282 years in prison...
...Even if they had been proved guilty, the length of the prison terms imposed suggests a degree of vindictiveness not warranted by the gravity of the offense they supposedly committed: top value for Mike's Grocery could hardly have been over $10,000...
...TV viewers heard the Templetons insist that Chavis was sitting in their rectory parlor when the firebombing occurred...
...One of the most puzzling "conspiracy" cases in North Carolina history, though lacking the drama of Joan Little's trial in the murder of her jailer for supposedly attempting to rape her, the Wilmington 10 still have drawn generous publicity...
...Along with political activists and opportunists, defense attorney Ferguson must accept some of the blame for the imprisonment of the Wilmington 10...
...To a greater degree than Ferguson, Stroud, chief prosecutor in the case, must bear responsibility for the irregularities in the original trial...
...In the spring, 1977, Morley Safer of "Sixty Minutes" interviewed Eugene Templeton III and his wife, Donna...
...Augustine's Episcopal College, Raleigh, N.C...
...Only the Reverend Benjamin F. Chavis, leader of the group, will be forced to wait until 1980 before being considered for parole...
...After agreeing to testify for the defense in the original trial, Templeton said, they had been frightened by rumors that they would be charged as accessories...
...The old populist notion that the decision of a jury—when arrived at without constraint and in full possession of the evidence— should be upheld, reinforced the court's decision not to order a new trial...
...Anne Sheppard Turner, the white Vista worker convicted of being an accessory in the firebombing, was out on parole...
...Governor Hunt has been under considerable pressure from Wilmington 10 supporters lately, but he hardly qualifies as a culprit...
...The reduced sentences will make eight of the men eligible for parole this year...
...After all, he wasn't involved in the legal proceedings, though his decision to commute only part of the prison sentences in place of granting full pardon didn't help his image as a compassionate and progressive governor...
...At the May, 1977 hearing, the Templetons belatedly testified to the whereabouts of Chavis and three other defendants on the night of the firebombing...
...Defense attorney Ferguson immediately appealed Judge Fountain's decision, and the case remained there until a few weeks ago...
...The prosecution's star witness, Allen R. Hall, began a series of recantations of his original testimony accompanied by behavior so bizarre that in one instance in which he kicked out the back door of a police car, leg irons were required to restrain him...
...In our list of culprits we must not leave out the Templetons, those Casper Milquetoasts who were more concerned with their own safety than they were in seeing justice done...
...Moreover, Stroud's statements in the press that Chavis arrived in Wilmington in 1971 "driving a Volkswagen" only to leave the city "in an Eldorado," besides being unsubstantiated, served to stir up further antagonism...
...Though the governor's decision hardly ends this celebrated case, it does afford one more level from which to analyze it...
...It was their call for help when Gregory Congregational United Church of Christ was under siege in Wilmington on that February day in 1971, that led the UCC's Commission on Racial Justice to send the Reverend Chavis to the city in an effort to help black students engaged in a school boycott growing out of demands for courses in black studies and a Martin Luther King, Jr...
...On a lower key, columnists Tom Wicker and Mary McGrory, along with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, criticized the prosecution's handling of the case...
...Already, defense attorney Ferguson has filed for a writ of habeas corpus in the federal courts...
...Responding to that criticism, Ferguson said, "It's hard to appreciate the drama of the moment when we had to decide whether to put on a partial defense, or whether to let the state's weaknesses stand for themselves...
...By this time, only nine remained behind bars...
...His relationship with prosecution witnesses, both before and after they testified, though not necessarily criminal in nature, was, to say the least, improper...
...Statements like those linking the 10 with political prisoners throughout the world encouraged judges, who are elected in this state and thus responsive to constituent pressures, to stand pat on their decisions...
...Their position becomes even more ambiguous when one recalls that it was their denomination, the United Church of Christ, that almost singlehandedly raised the half million in funds needed to sustain the defense...
...At the same time, Sam E. Hudson of New Bern was sentenced to ten years in prison and fined $10,000 for "misapplying" bank funds...
...He refused to order a new trial...
...So the search for culprits is likely to continue...
...The small money gifts he mailed to Hall and Mitchell when they were serving out their prison terms hint at a degree of sympathy not called for between a prosecuting attorney and a cooperative witness...
...Culprits in the case are not hard to find...
...Both recantations were taped and played before Judge Fountain...
...As the publicity built up, a series of events, occurring between the original trial and the post-conviction hearings, kept the case alive and fed suspicions that the punishment meted out—from 10 to 34 years in prison —was too harsh for a trial with so many irregularities...
...Presiding Judge George M. Fountain refused to grant permission for the prisoners to attend the court sessions...
...More likely culprits are those Wilmington 10 supporters whose public utterances, apparently designed to gain political mileage for themselves, merely added to local resentment against "outsiders...
...Stroud insisted that he had done nothing wrong, adding "He [Junious] was one of the cutest little boys I've met in my life, black or white...
...Attorney General Griffin Bell's earlier announcement that he would not intervene, left the matter squarely in the hands of Governor Hunt who, after several weeks of studying transcripts of the trial and the prison records of the nine men, announced that he would commute a portion of their sentences, making parole possible within two years...
...The state court of appeals' decision not to reopen the case, along with U.S...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 4
