Word: thagard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1965-1965
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...unpaid, part-time "special deputy," was indicted by a county grand jury for manslaughter, defined in Alabama as killing "intentionally but without malice." State Attorney General Richmond Flowers took over the prosecution, announced that he would seek a new indictment for murder. Last week, before Circuit Judge T. Werth Thagard, Flowers requested a postponement of the manslaughter trial. His main argument: the state's key witness, Morrisroe, was still hospitalized and too ill to testify. Thagard denied a postponement...
Whereupon Thagard ordered the attorney general's office to withdraw from the case, directed two local officials, Circuit Solicitor Arthur Gamble Jr. and County Solicitor Carlton Perdue, to handle the prosecution-even though Alabama law clearly empowers the attorney general "to direct the prosecution of any criminal case in any of the courts of this state...