Word: bradford
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...December of 1951, Bradford, then 16, and a 15-year-old black were arrested and charged with robbery. An indictment for rape was also added against Bradford...
When informed that he was being charged with the rape. "I tried to get the point across that not only was I not interested in raping. I wasn't interested in no sex--period." However, Bradford never got a chance to tell this to a jury. His attorney, a public defender, "convinced my parents to get me to plead guilty to clean the books because, he said, if you clean the books they'll give you a break." Despite his own misgivings. Bradford went along...
Thus, as George Jackson was later to do in California, 16-year-old Albert Bradford sold whatever legal rights of self-defense he had in the Missouri court system for the promise of a deal. Like Jackson, he was to discover that the promise was not merely false but almost fatal...
...Albert Bradford had assumed that when he entered a guilty plea he was confessing only to the robbery charge, for which he expected to get a 20 year sentence. The public defender had assured him that with good conduct he would be out in three. However, when Bradford appeared in court for sentencing, he was slapped with three concurrent life sentences: one for the robbery, one for the rape of a white woman that had happened during the robbery, and one for a rape that had occurred almost half a year before...
...Albert Bradford's crime and punishment were no different. He had been in the wrong place at the wrong time doing something wrong: however, he had not done THE wrong, had not been the one who had committed the southern crime of crimes. Some black boy had, and atonement must be made. Albert Bradford happened to be available. "Twelve years later, the judge wrote my mother from Florida and said that he felt bad that I wasn't out and that he felt that one of the reasons was they needed an example and I was the pound of flesh...