There could easily have been an eighth man scheduled to die this day were it not for the efforts of a white Georgia lawyer, J. W. Dennard of Cordele, whose client, a black man named Dennis Paul, had been convicted of killing another black man and his wife at a school commencement ceremony at a black church. “We were convinced of the fact that he was insane,” Dennard wrote Governor Rivers on December 7, 1938, “and raised the issue as best we could in the trial of the case, knowing that a pauper cannot properly raise and present an issue of this kind.” Dennard had already appealed the death verdict to the Georgia Supreme Court and lost. A commutation from Rivers was Paul’s only hope.
Dennard’s co-counsel in the case, Jack Forrester, had recently been elected to the state legislature, and during the contest he had found that his defense of Paul cost him votes. Forrester therefore told Dennard that “he would go no further” in Paul’s defense. “I advised [Forrester] that I was glad that I had never been in politics if it interfered with my oath as a lawyer and my conscience as a man,” Dennard wrote Rivers.
This was, however, a reality of race in the South at the time. Many white lawyers were also politicians. A vigorous, competent defense of a black killer could hurt a white lawyer politically, and there was no upside. Blacks were banned from voting in the Democratic primary, and Georgia was so solidly Democratic that it was effectively a one-party state.
Dennard, acting alone now, successfully pushed for a state “lunacy commission” to examine his client, Paul. The panel determined, unanimously, that Paul was indeed insane.
Dennard then asked Rivers to commute the sentence to life. “I feel like I had fought the good fight,” Dennard wrote Rivers. “My fight has been sincere, to the finish, and without recompense.”2
Rivers, devout Klansman though he was, would not let a certifiably insane man, even a black man, die in the electric chair, at least not a black killer whose victims were also black. He commuted the sentence to life.
The outlook did not look so bright for the seven other men condemned to die on December 9. Their court appeals, if they even had appeals, were all exhausted. Rivers could save them with one stroke of a pen. But there is no evidence that lawyers for four of the seven men—Williams, Rucker, Carter, and Russell—ever asked the governor for a pardon. These were the same four whose lawyers had failed even to file a simple motion for a new trial.
Rivers had already refused to commute the sentences of Arthur Mack and Arthur Perry, and had also declined to save Tom Dickerson.
One person who had not yet given up hope was Ruth Perry, the mother of Arthur Perry. On November 11, Ruth Perry wrote another desperate letter to Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the NAACP. She was a widow, a poor black woman living in the Deep South. But she was not willing to give up the fight to save her twenty-year-old son. “I am asking in the name of God … to please help me out if there is any way in this world,” the mother pleaded. “I have no money at all.”3
Marshall wrote a sad letter on December 6 to George P. Munroe, the white Columbus attorney and former judge who had defended Mack and Perry and even appeared before Rivers personally to plead for a reprieve. “We have received another letter from Mrs. Perry and it will be very hard for us to tell her that there is nothing we can do to save her boy,” Marshall wrote.4
It was possible to appeal the death sentences in the federal courts. But it would have been very expensive, and the NAACP did not have the money. Marshall even wrote somewhat apologetically to Munroe about the $25 invoice the Georgia lawyer sent to the NAACP for his work on the Mack and Perry cases. “I am certain that just as soon as we are able to set aside the $25 it will be sent to you,” Marshall wrote. “It will be an additional expense because the committee at one time felt that it was unable to contribute more to this case because of our limited budget.”5
Marshall wrote his final letter to Ruth Perry on December 6, three days before the scheduled execution, and he told her the grim news that “there is nothing further that can possibly be done in this case.” He urged her to remember that she, Munroe, and the NAACP had done all they could to save Mack and Perry. They had fought the good fight. “If you take this position,” Marshall wrote, “I am sure you can face the future with the belief that although justice was not given to your boy, it was something that could not be helped.”
Marshall closed the letter with the simple line “We join you in your sorrow.”6
Amid the gloom, Marshall still managed to see hopeful signs. Munroe, a respected white lawyer and former judge, had vigorously defended the two black men and helped secure for them two reviews by the Georgia Supreme Court and a second trial. This was proof that there was a base in the southern white legal community upon which to build, Marshall believed.
“It is this type of case which tends more and more to bring about a feeling that many of the courts in this country still prefer to permit prejudice to overcome a true sense of justice,” Marshall wrote Munroe. “However, we are sure that with the ever-growing group of individuals and lawyers in the south like yourself, who are willing to fight for justice, the battle is not lost and we still cling to the hope that eventually we will in this country have justice for all citizens.”7
There was little hope for Mack and Perry, but there was a chance for one of the seven condemned men.
The law in Georgia in 1938 required condemned men to be kept in their county jails until no more than twenty days, no fewer than two days, before the execution, when they would be transported to Tattnall Prison. All seven men would, therefore, need to be at Tattnall by at least Wednesday, December 7.
However, Raymond Carter, one of the three men convicted in the killing of the Jackson police chief, was scheduled to testify in the murder trial of Richard Smith, charged with killing a sixty-seven-year-old night watchman in Atlanta on October 16, about a week before the police chief of Jackson was killed. On Monday, December 5, Carter testified in an Atlanta courtroom that he saw Smith kill the watchman, Thomas H. Herd. “I saw Smith hit him with a milk bottle filled with sand that he had brought with him,” Carter said. When Smith’s defense attorney asked Carter if he had been promised anything in exchange for his testimony, the condemned man replied grimly that he expected “to die Friday.”7
Carter was scheduled to be taken to Tattnall Prison that same Monday, a few hours after he testified against Smith. The judge in the Smith murder trial, Paul S. Etheridge, warned officers not to take Carter to Tattnall if he would be needed to testify again later in the Smith trial.
Then, on Tuesday, December 6, one of the jurors in the Smith case, C. B. Irvin, fell ill, suffering from a high fever and lung congestion. A mistrial was possible, which might save Carter’s life, at least for the short term. Whether Carter lived or died on Friday could depend on whether the ill juror felt up to serving on Wednesday, December 7. If the juror was healthy enough to serve, Carter was “expected to die on Friday,” the Atlanta Constitution reported.8
Meanwhile, R. H. Herd, son of the man allegedly killed by Smith, wanted to watch Carter die on December 9. He wrote Rivers asking for “two passes” to the execution. The governor’s office replied that Georgia law did not allow him to witness the execution. “I regret that this is so,” the governor’s office wrote, “and were it possible, I can assure you we would be glad to permit you to witness the execution of the murderers of your father.”9
The sick juror, Irvin, did not return to the Smith murder trial. Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed, however, to continue the trial with only eleven jurors. So there would be no stay for Carter, even though the trial of Smith would still be under way on December 9, and Carter might well be needed for further testimony either in the current trial or, if there was a hung jury, in a second trial. There would be no way to recall Carter to the witness stand if he were dead. Even so, Carter’s scheduled execution was not halted. Prosecutors said they did not need Carter as a live witness. They could introduce Carter’s testimony from the grave using a written deposition from
his earlier court appearance.
There was also a flurry of activity surrounding Willie Russell, who had been convicted of killing the Cobb County farmer and his daughter. Behind bars at the Fulton County Jail awaiting execution, Russell blamed the killing on a crony, Willie Jones. Russell had not mentioned this before, but he had reportedly become angry when Jones sold a radio belonging to Russell for $5 while Russell was in jail. The allegation against Jones could possibly have been raised on appeal, but Russell’s lawyers never filed an appeal, and it was now two days before his execution. Police arrested Jones and investigated his possible involvement, but there was no stay of execution for Russell.
“Willie Russell is to be electrocuted Friday,” the judge in the case, J. H. Hawkins, and the district attorney, H. G. Vandiviere, wrote in a telegram to Rivers on December 7. “He now implicates Willie Jones in a murder. Investigations have been made and it is our opinion that there is no corroboration for such and we oppose the granting of any stay of execution in this matter.”10
On Thursday night, December 8, the condemned men were all safely assembled at Tattnall Prison and were given their last suppers of fried chicken or steak and sweet potato pie. There would be no breakfast in the morning. The men spent what they believed to be their final hours listening to hymns and prayers. Some actually managed to sleep.
Tom Dickerson, the man who had killed his daughter’s baby, wrote a final letter that night. It was addressed to his local newspaper, the Fitzgerald Herald. Dickerson handed it to the warden at Tattnall, A. J. Walton, who apparently never mailed it but would later forward it to Governor Rivers.
In the letter, Dickerson accused his children of forsaking him. He had warned the children in an earlier letter from jail immediately after his arrest not to mention to anyone that he was the father of his daughter’s baby, the baby boy he strangled to death with a rope. If they did release that fact, Dickerson warned, he would die in the electric chair. But his daughter, Tina Mae, the mother of the dead boy, had indeed testified against her father at trial, and here Dickerson sat a few hours away from death in the chair.
“There was someone that had more power over my children than I had and would not let them help me any way,” Dickerson wrote in the letter to the newspaper, a letter riddled with misspelled words and incorrect grammar.
Addressing his community one last time, Dickerson wrote, “I want the Dear People to know that my Dear Children has sent me to my death just to give someone else a good time. My dear girles has made every thing look mity bad on there part. I have beg them all to help me to save my life.”
The gaunt farmer blamed the Devil for his trouble, always capitalizing the references to that demon, respecting His power over mankind. “Don’t let no body lead you in truble,” the farmer advised young people. “That is just the reason I am in this truble to Day. I was misled by the Devil and He led me in the worst of truble and I have no one to blame for being led by Him but myself. God was willing to help me at all times but I did not except of him.”
He finished the six-page letter on an optimistic note: “I have made peace with my God and I feel that heaven is my home and I want to meat my dear children there. May God bless every one of them and every [one] else on earth is my prayer.”11
Behind the scenes, Dickerson’s friends and supporters were still trying to save him. Their approach centered on attacking the credibility of Tina Mae, the daughter who had testified against her father in court, who had told the jury that her father had raped her and then killed their infant child. In letter after letter to Governor Rivers, farmers from Ben Hill County wrote that Tina Mae was sexually promiscuous and that Dickerson was not, in fact, the father of the unnamed child.
In one affidavit, Jesse Taylor said that Tina Mae was “a girl of loose character, having sexual intercourse with men; that she had been caught even at Salem Church in the act of sexual intercourse.” Taylor said he had even walked up on Tina Mae and a man “having sex in a pecan orchard.”12
The letter writers called for life in prison, not death. Dickerson had admitted to killing the baby: “I killed the boy. I don’t deny it,” he told the jurors in his trial. “I killed it trying to save the scorn and disgrace off my children.” But if doubt could be cast on the rape and incest allegation, then the governor might be willing to stop the execution, the horror of the crime having been somewhat mitigated, at least in the public eye.
Surprisingly, and despite the fact that she was much maligned by the Ben Hill County farming community, Tina Mae herself wrote a letter to Rivers on November 30, pleading for him to spare the life of her father. “We feel that he is a changed man entirely,” she wrote Rivers, her spelling and grammar considerably better than her father’s. “He has a little baby girl just three years old and not large enough to realize anything. It will seem awful too the rest of us to have to tell her that her daddy died in the electric chair.”13
Rivers’s assistant Downing Musgrove replied to Tina Mae on December 5, four days before the scheduled execution. The governor “did not think he could disturb the judgment of the court in this regard,” Musgrove wrote. “We all sympathize with you greatly and wish so much we could grant your request in this regard.”14
Then, on the night of December 8, the night before the executions were to begin, two men from Dickerson’s hometown of Fitzgerald, one of them his attorney, drove several of the Dickerson children more than two hundred miles to the governor’s mansion in Atlanta “asking mercy for their father.”15
The plea was enough to prompt Marvin Griffin, one of Rivers’s assistants, to make late-night long-distance telephone calls to the judge, prosecutor, and sheriff in the Dickerson case. None of the three endorsed a commutation for Dickerson although the trial judge, A. J. McDonald, did promise not to criticize Rivers publicly should he commute the sentence to life.
“I hardly know what to say about it,” Ben Hill County sheriff Griner told Griffin in a telephone call from Tattnall Prison, where he had taken Dickerson to be executed. “I had rather just leave it to the governor. It was such a cold-blooded murder; the people were very much against it.”16
The prosecutor, Allan Garden, told Griffin that Dickerson’s supporters “have been working on the children ever since the trial came up.”
Garden explained that prosecutors had an open-and-shut case against Dickerson. “Personally, I think it was a cold-blooded murder,” said Garden. “He admitted killing the baby. The only possible question is who was the father of the child.”
Finally, Garden said, “I know in my own mind that we ought to do one or two things in Georgia: have capital punishment for murder and if it is not going to be enforced, it should be abolished.”17
In the case of Tom Dickerson, who had killed his daughter’s three-day-old baby by strangling him with a rope and then buried the baby in a box, capital punishment would not be enforced.
Late in the night before the executions, on December 9, Governor Rivers issued a thirty-day stay for Dickerson. A guard whispered the news to Dickerson, who sat barefoot on the edge of his cot, a cigarette in his hand. Dickerson dropped the cigarette, thought for a minute, and said, “Thank God. Maybe there’s still a chance.”
Rivers would later commute the sentence to life. Dickerson “has always been a hard-working farmer” the commutation order stated, adding that “there are a number of affidavits on file stating that the conduct, etc. of the children has not been good.” Less than a year after sentencing Dickerson to death, eight of the twelve trial jurors now recommended life, so that “the ends of justice would be met,” said the commutation order signed by Rivers.18
The one white man out of the seven condemned killers had been spared the electric chair and would spend the next eleven years, but not life, in prison.19
There were now six black men who were scheduled to die that Friday morning, starting at eleven o’clock. The warden at Tattnall Prison, A. J. Walton, would supervise the executions, but the man who would actually carry the
m out was an electrician named L. P. Cheatham. He was moonlighting at the prison; his primary job was as the electrician at Atlanta’s Grant Park Zoo.20 He had missed only 1 of the state’s 178 executions in the electric chair. He would be paid $75 per inmate. If all six prisoners died that day, he would take home $450. His three assistants would also be paid $10 each per execution.21
Cheatham predicted that the mass executions would take at least three hours to complete.
The death chamber was small, only fourteen feet wide and eighteen feet long. It was painted a medium green. The heavy oak electric chair remained unpainted. Electric wires dangled over the chair from the ceiling, and there were also wires attached from the floor. The chair legs rested on brown ceramic insulators, which kept the electricity from pouring into the floor.22
There were barred windows in the room to the side and behind the electric chair, but on this cold, gray day they admitted little light.
Behind the chair were an electric generator and a panel of knobs and switches controlling the current. The dials on the gauges went up to 3,000 volts, although 2,000 volts was the normal maximum dose applied in executions. Three men would throw switches and a fourth would control the electrical current.
There were two physicians present for the executions, Dr. W. H. Bennett of Sylvania and Dr. R. E. Jones of Reidsville.
The six black men spent the morning singing and praying. One of the preachers was a life-termer at Tattnall, William Raines.23 A black Methodist minister from Columbus, T. W. Smith, read the men passages from the Bible, including the Twenty-Third Psalm:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 12
