Not Guilty: Thirty Six Actual Cases in Which
An Innocent Man Was Convicted
(1957)
by Judge Jerome Frank and Barbara Frank
Excerpt from Chapter 5 on
James Montgomery
By 1923 it had become possible, at least in some areas of
the United States, for a Negro like James Montgomery to live as a respected
member of his community. Paradoxically the Ku Klux Klan could still flourish
in that same area. Montgomery, age twenty-six, a veteran of World War I, had
his home in Waukegan, Illinois. Although not, by any standards, a man of
means, most people would have thought him in comfortable circumstances. He
held a well-paying factory job that provided him with sufficient funds to
lay aside some money every year for an emergency or a luxury. He owned two
houses in the town. One he rented out; the other he and his wife occupied.
Appearances indicated that his marriage was more than usually happy and that
he found his life a fully satisfying one. But his world's end, swift and
terrible, rested on but a word or two.
The words were spoken by a sixty-two-year-old spinster, Mamie Snow. Mamie
sold notions, door-to-door, to keep herself alive. To fill the fearful void
she must have known, she lived largely in her fantasy. Sometimes Mamie's
images became so vivid she confused them with reality. One of Mamie's
fantasies sent Montgomery to the penitentiary.
Mamie knew Montgomery by sight, having often sold her wares in his
neighborhood. In the grip of a nightmare fancy about him, in December 1923,
Mamie went to the police with a story she doubtless thought was true: She
told the officers that Montgomery had attacked and raped her.
The police chief immediately arrested Montgomery. The prosecutor, a member
of the Ku Klux Klan, had had past dealings with Montgomery. A year before,
Montgomery won a civil suit against the prosecutor. Outraged by this
rejection of his creed of white supremacy, the prosecutor welcomed the
opportunity for revenge that Mamie's story afforded him.
As a matter of routine he had Mamie examined by a physician, Dr. John
Walter. Dr. Walter found no evidence of rape, thus destroying the case
against Montgomery, since his findings proved that there had been no crime.
But the prosecutor, determined to bring Montgomery to trial, suppressed the
doctor's evidence when he presented his case to the grand jury, which, on
the basis of the demented Mamie's testimony, indicted Montgomery for rape.
On the eve of trial Montgomery and his lawyer were threatened with the
violent wrath of the Klan if Montgomery set up a serious defense. The threat
had its intended effect.
In the first week of January, Montgomery went to trial. His terrified lawyer
did not examine the prospective talesmen; he accepted a jury hand-picked by
the prosecutor. After Mamie had told her story, the prosecution rested.
Montgomery's lawyer, who had not cross-examined, offered no evidence. The
case went to the jury, who, on January 9, 1924, found Montgomery guilty. The
judge sentenced him to a life term in the penitentiary.
Montgomery spent twenty-four prison years in utter hopelessness. To add to
his bottomless despair, he lived with the knowledge that his wife, barely
able to subsist after the funds from the sale of his property and life
savings had been exhausted, had fallen ill.
But the facts behind Montgomery's conviction finally emerged. In 1947 a
Chicago lawyer, Luis Kutner, visited a client in the penitentiary. Kutner's
client told Kutner that Montgomery needed help, and suggested that the
lawyer talk to him, since a belief prevailed among the prisoners that he was
innocent.
Kutner spoke with Montgomery in his cell. No one else knows what they said
that day, but Kutner left convinced that Montgomery did not belong in
prison.
Kutner began a thorough investigation into Montgomery's case since, although
he felt sure that he knew the facts, he needed proof. It took him two years
to collect that proof. He learned that Mamie, who died later in a mental
hospital, did not recognize Montgomery on the day after she identified him
at police headquarters. He obtained evidence of the Klan- inspired threats
to Montgomery and his lawyer. He spoke to Dr. Walter, who told him of the
evidence the prosecutor had suppressed.
His investigation complete, early in the summer of 1949 Kutner, on
Montgomery's behalf, filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus before
Judge Michael Igoe in the United States District Court of Chicago. On June
27, Judge Igoe held a hearing at which Dr. Walter testified that there had
been no crime. The judge then made an intensive study of the evidence. On
August 10, 1949, he handed down his opinion in which he said that
Montgomery's innocence was clear, as was also the prosecutor's guilt.
". . . society cannot suppress lawlessness by means of lawlessness," the
judge's opinion read. ". . . society cannot inspire respect for the law by
withholding the protection of the law from those accused of crime. It was
and is the prosecuting attorney's duty to assist in giving a fair trial to a
defendant . . .
"There is one way to stop a practice that has become altogether too common,
and that is to bring it to a conscious level where the public can scrutinize
it and take such steps as are necessary to ensure a true rendition of
justice to all. . . ."
The judge ordered Montgomery's release, on the ground that, because of the
gross unfairness of his trial, he had been denied his constitutional rights.
The state did not seek to try him again.
Through Kutner he brought suit against the state for $250,000, in the
Illinois Court of Claims. But that court turned Montgomery down on the
ground that, since the prosecutor was an employee of the county, the state
had no responsibility for the methods he pursued.
Until 1956 bills were introduced in the Illinois legislature to provide
compensation for the wrongly convicted man. In December of that year the
most recent bill died in committee. Apparently the ten dollars he received
from the prison warden, the sum given to each convict on his release, is the
only compensation the state feels is due Montgomery.
SOURCES
1. United States ex rel. Montgomery v. Ragen,
86 Fed. Supp. 382.
2. New York Times, August 11, 1949, 1:6.
3. New York Times, August 13, 1949, 10:2.
4. New York Times, August 26, 1949, 18:6.
5. Court of Claims Report, 21 Ill. 205.
6. Letter from Judge Michael L. Igoe, December 31, 1956.