Not Guilty: Thirty Six Actual Cases in Which
An Innocent Man Was Convicted (1957)
by Judge Jerome Frank and Barbara Frank

Excerpt on

Edward Larkman
 

On August 12, 1925, Ward Pierce, the paymaster of the Art Metal Shop plant in Buffalo, New York, was robbed and killed. Edward Larkman, a family man with a police record of several petty crimes, was arrested for the Pierce murder. The police knew that the killer had worn dark glasses during the robbery. Larkman was not placed in the police line-up. He was forced at police headquarters to stand alone under a bright light and to wear a pair of dark glasses, and was thus shown to an eyewitness to the crime, Dorothy Littleworth, who identified him. At his trial she testified that she had recognized him at police headquarters even though she had there seen his profile for only three seconds and his full face for only two. Larkman offered an alibi as his defense. The jury asked for information concerning the witness's identification of Larkman at police headquarters, but the method used by the police was not revealed. The jurors, after deliberating for forty-three hours, returned a guilty verdict. The judge sentenced Larkman to die in the electric chair. The court of appeals affirmed the conviction without opinion by the court's majority, but with a dissenting opinion by two judges, who felt that the identity of the defendant had not been established beyond a reasonable doubt. On the night of January 13, 1927, shortly before Larkman's execution was scheduled to take place, Governor Alfred E. Smith, as is customary when there has been a dissent, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The Governor said that, should a later disclosure prove Larkman innocent, "the State would be helpless if [he] were dead." In April 1929, Anthony Kalkiewicz, a Buffalo gangster, arrested for another crime, confessed that Pierce had been murdered, not by Larkman, but by a gang of five men, of which he, Kalkiewicz, had been one. Larkman applied for a pardon on the basis of the gangster's confession. Governor Roosevelt appointed Dean Carlos C. Alden to investigate the case. On March 24, 1930, his investigation complete, Alden recommended that Larkman be granted a new trial, predicting that Larkman would be acquitted, since, in his opinion, the new evidence pointed to Larkman's innocence. However, the motion for a new trial was denied on the ground that new evidence had not been presented within a year after Larkman's conviction. In June 1933, Larkman renewed his application for a pardon to the new Governor, Herbert Lehman. Lehman appointed Alden to reinvestigate the case. This time Alden recommended a pardon, mainly on the basis of the method of identification used by the police, a fact about which Alden had just learned. On April 18, 1933, Governor Lehman unconditionally pardoned Larkman, who had spent nearly eight years in prison, four of which he served after another man had confessed to the crime for which Larkman had been sentenced.

SOURCES

1. Opinion of Dean Carlos C. Alden, in the matter of the application of Edward Larkman for executive clemency, to the Honorable Herbert H. Lehman, July 12, 1933.

2. Release of Monday, December 18, 1933, Governor Herbert Lehman, state of New York, Executive Chamber in Albany, issued through Joseph J. Canavan, secretary to the Governor.

3. New York World-Telegram, December 18, 1933, p. 6.

4. New York Herald Tribune, December 21, 1933, p. 2.