Word: thagard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...assault and battery," a charge that Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers termed ridiculous. As the trial began, Flowers requested dismissal of the case, so as to leave open the possibility that Coleman might be rein-dieted on a charge of assault with intent to kill. Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard was only too happy to comply -dismissing the case "with prejudice," meaning that he did not want to hear it again in any event. (In the unlikely possibility that Coleman is reindicted, another judge can preside...
...turned out to be, in Flowers' bitter words, "nothing more than Uncle Toms." Despite impressive circumstantial evidence -an FBI ballistics expert testified that the bullet removed from the woman's brain was fired from a revolver owned by Thomas-the verdict was "not guilty." When Judge Thagard asked the Negroes individually whether they had concurred, each looked at the floor and muttered...
...Hayneville, Ala., anything short of outright acquittal had to be considered a surprise. And when Wilkins went on trial again last week, the odds against conviction had not changed. Juries in that very courtroom were remembering their old racist ways. Only last month, before the same Judge T. Werth Thagard who had presided at the first Wilkins trial, Tom Coleman had been acquitted of murdering another civil rights worker, Seminarian Jonathan M. Daniels...
...defendant. Relentlessly, Flowers and an assistant questioned each prospective juror, asking him whether he thought the white race superior to the Negro, whether he felt that any person like Mrs. Liuzzo who associated with Negroes thereby made herself inferior to other whites. Over vehement defense objections, Judge Thagard let Flowers get his answers. In short order, Flowers established that of 30 veniremen available for the jury, eleven felt that white civil rights workers were indeed inferior...
...Flowers dropped his bombshell. He demanded the right to challenge all eleven "for cause."* "How can the State of Alabama expect a fair and just verdict in this case from men who have already sat in judgment on the victim and pronounced her inferior to themselves?" he asked. Judge Thagard denied the motion. But he gave Flowers time to seek a reversal in Alabama's Supreme Court...