Word: conviction
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Lead Belly was in Manhattan last week about to appear in a Harlem vaudeville theatre when Researcher Lomax again made news with another singing convict. This one was James ("Ironhead'') Baker, a Negro who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Texas. At John Lomax' request Governor James V. Allred granted Baker a furlough to tour as a minstrel, visit penitentiaries in Mississippi, Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, sing his songs so that other convicts will understand what Lomax wants for his folk-song files in the Library of Congress...
...Governor Allred Convict Baker explained his nickname: "Wal, Guv'nor, when I first landed in de pen, I was chopping wood one day when we cut down an oak tree and a big limb hit me in de head. Dat limb broke, but I went right on workin'. So de boys call me Ironhead...
Said Republican Representative William Ekwall of Oregon: "To convict Judge Ritter you would have to pile up presumptions that wouldn't be evidence in Russia, let alone the U. S. The case against him would not stand up in a police court...
Based obviously, if not candidly, upon the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the play has an absorbing story to tell. Mio Romagna's father has been executed for a murder which he did not commit. He was considered a dangerous radical and all the potent forces of conventionalized prejudice united to convict him of a crime which was actually performed by a gangster. The injustice which society foisted upon the father makes an outcast of the Hamlet-like son, forces him into a relentless, selfless pursuit for revenge; not for the joy of revenge itself but for the vindication of his faith...
Star witness called by the Nazi prosecutor was a cowed-looking German in convict garb. Testifying in disjointed fragments, this jailbird swore that he had recognized a picture of Nisselbeck shown him by Nazi police as being that of a man he had seen consorting in Czechoslovakia with anti-Nazi refugees from Germany...