Word: alligood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...catch her words. She clutched a tissue but broke down in tears only once. Otherwise, Joan Little remained remarkably self-possessed through two days of painful testimony and crossexamination, sticking stoutly to her story that she had been defending herself from rape when she stabbed white Jailer Clarence Alligood to death with an ice pick in the Beaufort County Jail in Washington...
Weeping Jurors. Joan Little's version of what happened was far different and so affecting that two of the black women jurors wept. According to her story, Alligood came to her cell in search of sex three times between 10 p.m. on Aug. 26 and 3 a.m. on Aug. 27. Rebuffed the first time, he returned with a present of cigarettes and sandwiches. He left, but soon came back. "By then," she testified, "I had changed into my nightgown. He was telling me I really looked nice in my gown, and he wanted to have sex with me." Alligood...
...voice faltering, she told how Alligood had dragged her to the floor of the cell, held the ice pick to her face and forced her to engage in an act of oral sex. "I didn't know what he was UP, going to do, whether he was going to kill me," she said. After three to five minutes, Alligood's grip on the ice pick loosened. "I reached for the ice pick, he reached for the ice pick, I got to it first. I hit him with it while he was sitting on the bunk. He came...
Despite repeated, often shouted questions, Prosecutor Griffin failed to shake her story. Why had she never "screamed, hollered, slapped or run" from Alligood? "Mr. Griffin, if you had been a woman, you wouldn't have known what to do either. I was scared." Why hadn't she reported Alligood's earlier advances? "In Washington, N.C., coming up as a black woman, it's different saying what you did and having your word go up against a white person's." Griffin took her over the painful details again and again. "Did you go down on your...
Whether Joan had indeed engaged in sex with the jailer, willingly or under force, will be a basic issue at the trial. She claims she successfully fought off the attack. The county medical examiner reported finding what appeared to him to be semen on Alligood's thigh-an inconclusive point, certain to be argued. Joan could not be examined for evidence of rape because she ran out of the jail after the killing, surrendering eight days later with her lawyer...