Word: jailer
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...their ears to 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...
...appearance on the witness stand was the climactic moment in the five-week-old trial, which had become a cause celebre among feminists and civil rights activists (TIME, July 28). Citing mostly circumstantial evidence, Prosecutor William Griffin contended that she lured the 62-year-old jailer into her cell with a promise of sex and then killed him in order to escape from the jail, where she had spent 81 days after being convicted of breaking and entering...
...tension stems from conflicting theories of why Joan (5 ft. 3 in., 120 lbs.) stabbed Jailer Clarence Alligood (5 ft. 8 in., 200 lbs.) eleven times with an ice pick in the Beaufort County jail in Washington, N.C. (pop. 9,000), on Aug. 27, 1974. Joan, her lawyers and a spontaneous coalition of feminists, civil rights and prison-reform advocates insist that she was defending herself against rape by her 62-year-old white jailkeeper. To them, this is a classic example of the way rape victims can be railroaded by male-dominated legal systems, and of how black women...
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...
...peek at private heroism and unsuspected virtues: Sir Walter Scott dictating three novels while he writhed in agony from attacks of gallstones; Samuel Johnson quietly doing public penance for a childhood act of disobedience committed 50 years earlier; Oscar Wilde, in prison and disgrace, discussing books with his respectful jailer; Poet John Stubbs, condemned to have his right hand cut off for offending Queen Elizabeth I, lifting his hat with his left hand and crying out, "God save the Queen...