1971’s Wilmington 10 Were Finally Pardoned on the Last Day of 2012 — Thirty-Two Years after the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals Overturned the Original Trial Verdict — on Grounds Equivalent to Perjury, Prosecutorial Misconduct, and Implied Racism — a Reminder that American Justice too often Is Not

01 January 2013

Outgoing Democratic Governor Beverly Perdue pardoned the Wilmington 10 in North Carolina yesterday — “only” 32 years after they should have been

Four of the group are dead. The pardon is not going to help them.

The other six are elderly.

Consequently, the pardon’s most glaring attribute lies in its demonstration of how long the “powers that be” — and the people who directly and indirectly vote for them — can wallow in self-indulgent denial of “sin.”

The 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals December 1980 reversal should have provided a clue

The appellate court’s rejection of the trial result — in its Chavis v. State of North Carolina, 637 F.2d 213 (4th Cir., 1980) opinion — made it clear that the process that had sent the ten to prison was based on perjury, prosecutorial misconduct, and (one can imply) racism.

Lollygagging on the way to laggard integrity

After the appellate court reversal, for 32 years, no one with the governmental power to rectify wrongs in North Carolina bothered to do anything. Even under determined agitation from the evanescently tiny proportion of the world’s population that has the audacity to actually care about integrity in justice:

The three key witnesses who took the stand for the prosecution recanted their testimony in 1976. And the prosecutor, Stroud, became a flashpoint for the Wilmington 10 supporters.

In November, NAACP state leaders said they believe newly uncovered notes show Stroud tried to keep blacks off the first jury and seat whites he thought were sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan.

They showed the notes on a poster board, saying the handwriting on the legal paper appeared to match notes from other prosecution records in the case.

At the top of the list of 100 jurors, the notes said, "stay away from black men." A capital "B'' was beside the names of black jurors. The notes identify one potential black juror as an "Uncle Tom type," and beside the names of several white people, notations include "KKK?" and "good!!"

You can read more about these aspects of the misbegotten case in multiple places. One of the best series of articles has been written by Cash Michaels at The Wilmington Journal.

The moral? — The injustice actually gets worse

Martha Waggoner, writing for the Huffington Post, reminds readers of more alleged facts. Namely that the unrepentant Wilmington 10 prosecutor Jay Stroud had been diagnosed as bipolar upon graduating from law school and has been arrested multiple times:

Stroud has been arrested more than a dozen times in the past six years, and his son told The Gaston Gazette in 2011 that his father suffers with bipolar disease and that he was diagnosed about the same time he graduated from law school.

"I think she has made a mistake," Stroud said of Perdue on Monday.

"The case was prosecuted fairly, and the jury reached a unanimous verdict fairly quickly after a six-week trial. And they found all 10 defendants unanimously guilty of all charges. And I think her decision is flying in the face of the jury's verdict."

Mr. Stroud’s conclusion means that he missed the point of what the 4^th Circuit Court of Appeals had been trying to tell him about how the American justice system is supposed to work.

Worse, for 32 years, North Carolina has knowingly supported the results of a verdict attained by an apparently mentally ill prosecutorial racist, who was (and apparently still is) too stupid to understand the Constitutional ins and outs of American criminal procedure.

That result too often typifies the American justice system.

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