WTW21: Stennis Makes His Case

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:42 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke. I'm Thomas. That's Lydia. How you doing?

0:00:47 Lydia: Pretty good.

0:00:47 Thomas: Well, prepare to be bummed. I gotta issue that same content note from last episode. This is part two of two about the Brown v. Mississippi trial and the true crime podcast that we're doing about the murder of Raymond Stewart in 1934. So make sure you listen to part one. So I mentioned that the book I read is called, I know I'm going to keep bragging about the one book I've ever read, but I've read it like four times now. So that's like four books, The title of it, was "A Scotsboro Case in Mississippi." And you might wonder, what does that mean?

And, this is not a deep dive or anything, but just to give you an idea of, what kind these, these three black men are up against: Scottsboro boys were nine black male teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931. And so 1931, we're in 1934 right here, um, and the case vice is, terms of what eventually happened with the Supreme Court and all that, is kind of a mixed bag. But to read some Wikipedia to you, hun, I know we're kind of extending our personal relationship on the air here, but I'm going to read some Wikipedia for you.

0:00:49 Lydia: Boy.

0:01:02 Lydia: Maybe Right.

0:02:00 Lydia: Me dim the lights. Hang on.

0:02:06 Thomas: Wikipedia to on March 25th, 1931, two dozen people were hoboing on a freight train. And like, I just got to say, why can't we all just hobo along? Like, why did there have to be any more to the story? We could all jump on a free train. We could play, some of that music that was in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? You know? Yeah. None of this needed to happen.

0:02:27 Lydia: Napsack slung over our shoulder. Yeah.

0:02:30 Thomas: The hobos were a mix of whites. But then all of a sudden, guess who ruined it? The white people. So one of the white teenage boys saw another black kid trying to get on the train and was just like, "nah, it's a white man's train." And then the white kids tried to force all the black kids off, but they weren't able to. The black teenagers were able to kind of defend themselves. And so then the white kids were, kind of jumped off the train or were forced off the train and they decided to go talk to the city sheriff wherever they were. And they said they were attacked by a group of black teenage boys. And that's pretty much a death sentence like it echoes of, stories we've heard in recent years of calling the police on like a black man or

0:02:30 Lydia: Oh my god. Yeah, yeah,

0:03:11 Clip: And called police, referring several times to being threatened by, quote, an African-American man. There is an African American man, I am in Central Park, he is recording me, I'm threatening myself and my dog. Though Cooper does not appear to move any closer to the woman, her call becomes even more frantic. I'm being threatened by a man into the ramble, please send the cops immediately.

0:03:53 Thomas: That's an age old, deadly thing that, has been in white the person's arsenal in this country.

0:03:58 Lydia: You'd wish it'd look different nearly a hundred years later, but here we are.

0:04:02 Thomas: Yeah, it's definitely different, but, you know, not not enough different. Because the on the train, also had two white women. Or it doesn't say their age, I guess, but it says white women. Uh, must have been among them. Maybe they were 18 or something, I don't, or know, who knows what the hell the age of being a woman was considered at that time. I have No goddamn idea, but anyway, they also decided to like accuse the black kids of of rape as well, as I already said. So it looks like about 10 black kids were with rape, and three rushed trials in which they had, almost no legal representation, and there were all white juries, they were all convicted of rape and sentenced to death.

0:04:06 Lydia: Yeah that's

0:04:43 Thomas: The Common sentence in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women, even though there was no medical evidence indicating that rape had taken place. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book kind of about the interplay between the NAACP, which was, you know, not that old at the the time. I think it was founded in 1909 or so. And some other groups that had tried to help the Scottsboro defendants. One was like the Communist Party of the USA. And then there's also of these other groups. And because go great, I some of that tension is set up going forward, but anyway, appealed the Alabama Supreme Court, and obviously that didn't fucking do anything because it still has Alabama in it, you got one dissent, and it was actually the chief justice. That's important, like, I think of the things that is is somewhat positive to see is the people who did speak up.

0:04:43 Lydia: My god, and

0:05:35 Thomas: Not enough, obviously, but there are people who didn't speak up and suffered reputational consequences for it. But that wasn't near enough here because ultimately the convictions were affirmed. So the case ended up appealed while the case is, I guess there's like multiple, I don't know how they grouped them, but there's like different trials, you know, but they were appealed to the Supreme court. And a result, this was, we've kind of talked about it a little bit, of, there were more, a few more guarantees given of how a fair trial needs to go. You know, like that's part of this jurisprudence. This is just a sidestep along the way on our hoboing train here, so I'm not going go into the details, but just worth noting, in a bit of foreshadowing, what happens when the Supreme Court intervenes here. So here I'll read again. The case was first returned to the lower court and the judge allowed a change of venue, moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama.

0:06:26 Thomas: During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted to fabricating the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys touched either of the white women. The jury still found the defendants guilty, the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial. The judge was replaced and the case retried. The new judge ruled frequently against the defense. For the third time, a jury, now with one African-American member, returned a guilty verdict. The case was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. It ruled that African Americans had to be included on juries and ordered retrials. Were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants.

The other five were convicted and received sentences ranging from 75 years to death. Three Served prison sentences. In 1936, one of the Scotsboro Boys was shot in the face and permanently disabled during an altercation with a sheriff's deputy in prison. Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death in the final trial, jumped parole in 1946 and went into hiding. Yeah, this is kind of interesting. He was found in 1976 and pardoned by George Wallace. Imagine how bad your trial had to be to be, George Wallace was like, oh, okay, I'm gonna pardon you. But but still

0:07:07 Lydia: My God.

0:07:39 Lydia: Yeah, that was embarrassing.

0:07:40 Thomas: Segregation today, segregation, like geez. This highlighted kind of the problem that, like, juries were taken from voter rolls. Voter rolls didn't Contain very many black people because of awful Disenfranchisement.

0:07:42 Lydia: Wow. Yeah. They were disenfranchised.

0:07:52 Thomas: Yeah. So what I wanted to point out is knocking another bit of naivete off of, I guess, my brain. When these things get reversed, that's not the end of the story. You in the movies or something, that's usually, ah, it's the Supreme Court, you get the exterior photo, you know, and it's like, wow, they did it, they overturned the, what, no, it's not at end. These if not the end for these Scottsboro kids, uh, that did almost nothing for them actually.

0:07:52 Lydia: Yeah.

0:08:17 Lydia: Just a quick note that I knew nothing about this story, Scottsboro, except I think it's a musical, and I had no idea what it was about until this very moment.

0:08:24 Thomas: Yeah, It is a Musical. Until You get cast as the lead and you're like, I Don't think I should do this. I don't think This Is Not, yeah, I bet.

0:08:31 Lydia: I don't think this is appropriate casting. Yeah, yeah. No idea what it was about, but it's a musical somehow. So yeah,

0:08:42 Thomas: It sucks, don't make musicals out of awful racial violence, that's just my personal rule, I'm, I'm gonna follow that rule. Not everyone does. Just to grab another couple sentences here, the the prisoners were taken to court by 118 Alabama guardsmen armed with machine guns and That might just be to stop the lynching. You Know, like, that's, this is nuts. Like, there's a picture of a crowd gathering, like it's fucking crazy. And the trials take place in this like fucking hostage situation, you know, with a bunch of angry white people with guns, like right outside, you, you know, it's just, it's absolutely nuts.

I'm sure these three defendants are going to get a fair trial. I'm, so we left off by, I gave you pretty much what the newspaper version of the trial was, Which was like these heroic police, they asked very nicely and these three black men confessed all together and we're like, we're so glad we're confessing, which, you know, right away, I would think to any rational person would be like, why would they confess, they're just going to be killed, like, they're they're confessing. Yeah, like they're confessing, and then they're going to be hanged, so why would

0:08:57 Lydia: My God. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:09:50 Thomas: They ever do that, one might might wonder. Know, apparently, a lot of people didn't wonder that or didn't care. And so I left off with that newspaper version. And then I've read the entire transcript 100 times. And I want to tell you what happened. It's man, it's so fascinating. Also, like I said, horrifying, and gonna need, again, a content note on this one. But it's also just so so fascinating to get like a glimpse into 1930s law. You much, there's interesting stuff about these people's lives, uh, up, just, you know, all that little detail that's just puts you right there, that's really interesting. So there's some combination of how did the law work in 1934 in Mississippi, versus also how the law work when you had black defendants in, like, I don't know how much of the rules were just ignored or didn't exist.

0:10:36 Thomas: You know what I mean? Like, there is a lot of stuff missing that I would think would be very important. But I also know that, from my knowledge of legal history, you Know, a lot of our rights that we consider our fundamental rights actually didn't exist back then.

0:10:51 Lydia: Not to like the 60s 70s for a lot of them.

0:10:52 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And 50s.

0:10:54 Lydia: Yeah Federal

0:10:54 Thomas: Yeah. Because the law was truly different. And a lot of this story later on is kind of about that, because again, this was a key Supreme Court decision. And a lot that story, the more legal journey of that, that I'll tell later does involve the the fact that like, hey, we didn't have 14th Amendment rights necessarily because they weren't incorporated to the states, it was just like, oh yeah, if you're charged, federally, yeah, sure. Sure. And like it's this process of more and more rights being incorporated, not like incorporated explicitly, they were kind of read into the Constitution and interpreted such that states did need to do certain things in order to ensure you had due process, because due process important.

But not so important here, apparently. And it's hard to know. I'm not a lawyer or a legal scholar. It's hard to tell how much of this was the norm, how much of this was the norm just because the defendants were black or how much of it was like, the only thing that ensures things are done right is one fucking judge basically at the time. And then if you appeal, if you're able to appeal, then then maybe that would, correct some mistakes.

But like, for the most part, this one judge is the master of this courtroom and their decisions on what, what is OK and what isn't basically defines the legal process for these three people whose lives are at stake. OK, And so the state opens their case and arguing arguing for the state, somebody you might know.

0:11:37 Lydia: Is it Stennis?

0:12:20 Thomas: It's John Stennis, since he is the prosecutor. We start with kind of the basic stuff. First up is the victim's brother, and he just testifies about like the house layout. And he made a drawing, apparently, that's entered into evidence. Obviously don't have that, but it's in the transcript. Then neighbor, William Adams, Adams the one who found the body. He says he was alerted by Ellis Giles. So presumably that means Ellis Gilles found the Body, but that person also appears to be Black. What's odd in a weird way is transcript will literally say colored next but not always actually because they, they didn't on one of the defense. Again, whose mom is the stenographer? We don't, you know, we don't know if it's like how professional, how good of a job anyone does in any of these things. So fucking hard to tell. Anyway, Ellis Giles, I think found the buddy or alerted William Adams. It says the neighbor, but it doesn't say what, maybe they just alerted them that like, oh, I haven't seen him today.

0:13:01 Lydia: Yeah, that's Mr.

0:13:15 Thomas: So I don't maybe.

0:13:15 Lydia: Stewart hasn't shown up, where I was expecting to work with him this morning or something like that. Yeah.

0:13:20 Thomas: Yeah. So anyway, that neighbor stayed until the doctors came. Dave Owen, another person who just fucking was there also stayed. Don't know who he is, but he, I guess maybe had some business with him or something because he arrived at the house too. And then he also testified as to some of the details of the murder. And then these two doctors are next. So basically those people called the doctors, who the hell knows how long that took in 1934.

0:13:43 Thomas: Um, the two doctors that testify, um. Again, I'm not a true crime podcaster and I hate true crime stuff. I only consume it when it's like a really good documentary or something. So I don't know how they normally do this. There's probably some like really inappropriate music or they're probably super excited to give you all the gory details. I dunno, but I'll give kind of picture of this. Cause it's interesting to like, I've tried to go through the evidence and figure out like why anyone was a suspect or like, was it truly just that they were black or not? It's not easy to puzzle that out. You would think that would be very easy. You would thinking a trial, the necessary thing that Stennis would have presented is like, so here's why we suspected this person. Here's how we arrested him. Here's that like, no, not really much of that. Like it's, it's very unclear, believe it or not. So if I leave any of that out, you know, it'S possible I missed something, but it'S more, I've read this a lot. It'S more likely they just didn't fucking bother.

0:13:42 Lydia: Yeah, Yeah? Yeah.

0:14:33 Thomas: It's weird. And part of that is not necessarily like sinister. In Stennis's mind, these three suspects confessed. And so there's a lot of work that I think he didn't think he had to do. Oh, let me note this. I forgot to say this at the outset. These three suspects, and no, Ed Brown is So Yank Ellington, And then Henry Shields, they who pleaded guilty. They go in, they plead guilty, except for Henry one, Shields didn't plead guilty.

The other two, think, plead guilty and the judge just says, nah, don't know if it was because like I doubt this, but maybe if you plead guilty you avoid the death penalty? But it's 1934 in Mississippi, Sippy. I kind of doubt that's true, but that's what happened. They pleaded guilty. It's in the transcript and So we're only having this trial because the judge was like, I don't accept your guilty pleas, I guess. I don't know why. There's not much written about it, but like, it's really interesting to keep in mind. Maybe it's because they were all together and one of them didn't plead guilty. Maybe. I do not know. Who knows? Anyway, here is what the doctors testify to and some of the other details from some of those other people who were first at the scene. Guy is dead.

We got broken pieces of of a lamp chimney, uh, that he was hit with in the head, and a lamp chimney is just that glass thing that goes, you know, above like a little lantern thingy. He was hit with that, large puddles of blood. Body, Stewart's body was like put against the door, and and it's been interesting trying to, you know, interpret some of this old-timey stuff, but there's like the cotton seed room, I guess, because it's a cotton farm,

0:15:18 Lydia: Judge wanted to. Huh.

0:16:05 Lydia: Right.

0:16:05 Thomas: Know. There's I a cottonseed room, and that's where he was, and he seemed to have been moved there. Shirt was scorched and burned a little bit. As for the injuries, it looks like he got freaking axed in the right shoulder, which is awful. Like his collarbone's broken, and it's like, that's Horrible. Um, his cheek, right cheek, was like burnt off or rubbed off, they couldn't tell, but he had multiple head injuries, multiple fractures, four or five in total. He got like a puncture wound, like it looks like basically he was brutally beaten to death with several different things. The doctor said like the top of his head, his bones were beat to jelly, in quotes.

So like just awful, but he's not dead, like he he was, yeah it's humans, or ridiculous, like I don't know how life works, but he, they held on to it for a while, at least until those people found him, and then I think by the time the doctor, I don't, but one of the doctors got there, he was dead, but like it's Pretty crazy, he lived for 10 hours, I, 12 hours, they don't know precisely because they didn't have, Gil Grissom or or anything. But, they asked the doctors like, "Well, what caused the death?" And both of them say the same thing. Basically any of the injuries, except for the shoulder one, pretty much any one of those were bad enough that it could have

0:16:22 Lydia: Ugh. Oh my god. That's crazy.

0:17:00 Lydia: Yeah. But

0:17:18 Thomas: Killed them.

0:17:18 Lydia: They would have been fatal.

0:17:19 Thomas: Yeah. And So that's like, you know, the first four or five witnesses, then it already starts getting weird. Like that was the most normal part. Like that Was pretty much recognizable more or less as like, oh, that's how a trial works. You you establish the scene and the doctors and the cause of death. And then it Already starts getting Weird and Southern and racist and old timey. The thing about this is I can't tell you what combination of that it is. You know, like it might be totally normal, but just old, or it might be totally racist and not normal, know, like, so the next witness is someone with an amazing name, Henry Lavender. I'm going to read you the first part here. And see you what you notice. Question. This is Mr. Henry Lavender. And this is Stennis, by the way. A. Yes, sir. Question. You live in this county over near where Mr. Raymond Stewart did live? Yes, Sir. Four miles from him.

0:17:19 Lydia: Mm-hmm.

0:18:05 Thomas: After Mr. Stewart's... And I wish I could do my foghorn leghorn. We got to get? Daniel Craig to do his like... What's-his-name?

0:18:11 Lydia: Knives out.

0:18:11 Thomas: Yeah, like that accent. After Mr. Stewart's death, were you making an investigation or assisting in making an investigation into the cause of his death? Yes, sir. Tell whether or not you went to the house of one of the defendants here, Henry Shields. Yes, sir. Don't tell what it was, but did you receive any information? Yes, sir. We got information there was something down there, and we went to make an investigation to see what we would find. Tell what you found there. We went down to his house. We went by Mrs. Etheridge's and asked, could we make an investigation. She told us to go, and if we needed to, go ahead and break in. We went to the window and shook it, and it came open. We went in the house and opened the door and found a pair of shoes by the door where it looked like a bench had been pulled up there and shoes pulled off. Tell what you did there. We went and we turned up the bed and looked under the bed and couldn't find nothing.

0:18:13 Lydia: Yeah, oh

0:18:59 Thomas: We got in the kitchen, and there was a pen built in the corner of the house about three feet high. We seen a pile of clothes in there, in and them, and down about that deep, he must be gesturing, in the clothes, we found a jumper. We pulled it out and seen gray hairs on it. I said, don't you reckon this is hog hair? We take it to the light, and they said, no, this is human. We spread it out, and looked and found blood on the jumper in the front of both arms, and also all over the back, and there was some slobber on the back and gray hairs. That was where they had hit him on the head, I suppose, and knocked the hair out. You observed the hair of what color there? Gray. State whether or not, in your opinion, it was human hair. It was. Do you know Mr. Raymond Stewart? Yes, sir. What was the color of his hair? It was gray. And I'll stop there. But, I imagine gasps in the courtroom, you know, well,

0:19:46 Lydia: I Like, how it's, uh, don't say what brought you over there, because they just broke into someone's house and they're trying to say that there's probable cause, but

0:19:56 Thomas: Best I can tell, that's because it would be hearsay. So, like, there's constant objections whenever someone's like, and he said, objection sustained. So, I think he's trying to not have them say, like Like, well, they told me this and that's why I went over there. So I think that's why that was.

0:20:11 Lydia: Okay. And then the other piece that jumps out at me is, what are his qualifications to distinguish between, you know, hog hair, human hair, and whoever's with them, how, don't how would you know?

0:20:21 Thomas: Yeah, think I you could go further than that. Yeah. Who the fuck is this guy?

0:20:24 Lydia: Me, yeah Well, that's what I

0:20:28 Thomas: Is he a police officer? No, he's just a guy.

0:20:28 Lydia: Was saying, okay. And I think that's why I clued in at the beginning. I probably assumed he was involved in law enforcement because of the whole, don't you, don't say, well, I thought that that was the, you he had probable cause to go in there, but if he's just a random dude that just broke through a window on

0:20:36 Thomas: Yeah. No, he's, he turns out to be, I believe he's one of the people that one of them lived with. I can't remember, which I've absorbed so much information, but later on it becomes clear that, like, that, and actually maybe it's worth going into that here, each of these black suspects, and I imagine many black people around here at the time, they all live on someone's property yeah they don't get to own their fucking house. They just, they're sharecroppers, a lot of them, not, they live on someone's property. And Henry Shields is the one, I don't believe he's a sharecropper. I I don't think, but also he lives on someone else's property.

0:21:03 Lydia: A white man's property kind kind of thing yeah, yeah Well, because that's the person who said go ahead and break on in, if you need to probably

0:21:19 Thomas: Mrs. Etheridge. Yeah. You're just like, and that's an interesting legal question nowadays. I can't remember what the answer to it is, but I think nowadays you're not allowed to just have, like, if we're renting an apartment to somebody and they're a suspect, I can't remember. It's an interesting legal question. The police are like, can we search it? I'm thinking about out how due process works, and and you want to be protective from unlawful search and seizures and all that stuff. It seems weird to be like, yeah, but only if you're a homeowner, like if you are a renter, then fuck you. Like, that seems weird.

I feel like the right should be, well, yeah, wherever you live, that's your home, whether or not you own it, and you should have the right to to be able to like consent sent or not to a search. I think that's how maybe it works now, but I don't know, I'm not a fucking lawyer. Back then, uh, we're so far away from anyone giving a shit about that, let alone with a black person, like I don't, I think about how many levels of weird that is. This is just some fucking guy. We have no idea why he suspects this guy, what information he's acting on, but he's, he's like the most important, he's the first witness in terms of, the suspects and not just like, you the body and the death and the whatever. This is the first witness that's not just a medical person or someone who found the body, and this is, is what it is.

You're Henry Lavender, who are you? No fucking idea. You're just a guy, and you, you like, did your own investigation? Oh, yeah, cool. So he went to Henry Shields' house. He asks, know, you Mrs. Etheridge, I guess, who must be the, well, let's be real, probably she didn't own it either. Her husband probably did, but anyway,

0:22:03 Lydia: Yeah right right yeah

0:22:50 Thomas: She gives consent, and they go and they search, and they find those things. That is so fucking weird. Like, that is just, I don't know if that's just how things work, or that's how things worked when you were black in Mississippi at this time, but about, like, chain of custody stuff, like, okay, so you're not a police officer, I don't even trust it when police say they found something, but like Let alone a guy who's like, yeah, we found this. And not only that, um, what's your expert fucking opinion on the hair that you found? Not hog hair, it's human hair, and it was like, it's fucking okay.

0:23:09 Lydia: I know also He said that he thought it was hog hair first.

0:23:22 Thomas: At first. Yeah, I like that detail, it was interesting. I won't read the whole rest of it, but, like, they find the jumper, and then the, he also found an axe in the wood pile, and so they enter that into evidence, and he says, I picked up the axe like this, and I laid it on a stick of wood, and I looked on it, and I found blood. The ax looked like it had been freshly washed. You can see on top there, the rust where it was freshly washed, it looks like it failed to wash off there. You can say, he must be pointing, you can take it and see for yourself. Wait a minute, at the time you found it, state whether or not the blood on it appeared to be fresh blood. Yes, sir. Okay. And they introduced that coat and ax and exhibits. A lot, very clearly, virtually every white person involved in this thinks these three black defendants are incredibly stupid. It's important to remember that these are extremely poor people in the South, and these black people have had no access to education.

0:23:22 Lydia: Yeah.

0:24:15 Thomas: They're illiterate, they've seen nothing but a life of, hard labor, and so, like, obviously there's, they're not educated, they're, I don't know how, like, smart they would be able to be in these situations. But it strikes me as like, okay, but even trying to take all that on board, if you're gonna wash a murder weapon, you think you would fail to wash off the blood of it? Like, so he's saying like you can see it was washed, but also, anyway, there's still blood on it. Like, what? There's a lot of that where you're like, oh, I guess these white people just believe they're so stupid, they freely confessed and sucked at washing off the murder. Like, all this stuff. It's just crazy. Like, how would you think that that would happen? I don't know. And this is where things get pretty important here. So the next is Sheriff J.H. Adcock, Sheriff of Kemper County. And this is where we really get an important event, because Stennis starts asking him the basics.

0:25:05 Thomas: Who are you? You know, who are the defendants? Kind That of basic stuff. And after a couple questions, the lawyer Spinks, one of the lawyers, And they were all court appointed, obviously. Side note, you didn't have a right to an attorney, except I believe at this time you had the right to an attorney in a capital case. So if your life was at stake at this time, I guess you had the right to an attorney. So just barely, I imagine. So that's why they had three attorneys who were, didn't want to be there And so one of them, Spinks, suggests that the rest of this examination for now be had out of the presence of the jury. Judge apparently agrees. And so without the jury there, I guess Stennis continues.

And clearly, point of this testimony is the sheriff was the one who heard their confessions, or one of, sorry, three people who heard Their confessions. We'll get to that later. And are doing, I guess, something that might be the norm, which is, well, we'd better talk about how these confessions happened without the jury there so we can figure out if they're admissible. Not entirely clear what rules there are that would make them admissible or not.

0:25:24 Lydia: By

0:26:10 Thomas: But I guess there was enough of that infrastructure there somewhere to make this something the judge was cool with, and so they asked some questions. While Stennis is asking questions, everything's 100% above board. Oh, no, there was no, I told him you're free, you talk freely, tell the truth, no harm can come to you. Yeah, I can read some of this. Before you talk to these boys, tell whether or not you told them who you were and what else you told them. Well, I talked to them separately. I told them that I wanted them to tell me the truth about that tragedy over there, that I was the sheriff, Mr. Creekmore was present, and he was a deputy, and that all the other men were officers trying to save them from any harm or danger outside. And that was the reason that all of them were there. I said, go on, tell the truth about this thing. No harm can come to you here.

0:26:56 Thomas: When you talk talk to them there, state whether or not you told them whether they must talk or they could leave off talking. And I keep in mind, Miranda rights don't exist at this time, but there's still some, like, that's the interesting thing is when we talk about something like Miranda rights, not. I'm giving you kind of my impression, my educated impression of this, but not expert. I think there were things like that on a state by state basis, you know, like there were different rules that states had, but it's not until these landmark cases where where it's like the federal government is like, no, you have to always do it. Like the Supreme Court says, no, this is something that is implicated by the constitution.

0:27:06 Lydia: The Constitution, yeah.

0:27:32 Thomas: Yeah, so like, so it doesn't mean like before Miranda rights, there was no such thing as the idea that anyone had to tell anyone there, you know what I mean? But it just formalized it and said, all states must do that. So that, I think that's the reason for this kind examination before the jury for a couple of things like, okay, did they know what they were doing there? And also, it seems to be important whether or not the sheriff promised immunity or anything, because I think perhaps that know, suspect that would make the confessions, perhaps not valid. I'm just this is me divining from the fucking tea leaves that are here. But those seem to be maybe some of the concerns. I'll continue. No, sir. I only on insisted them telling the truth. I told them to tell the truth and the whole truth, regardless of who it might hurt or help. Did you offer them anything to tell it, or did you make any kind of promise of immunity to them? No, sir. I told them I couldn't promise them anything at all.

0:27:33 Lydia: Oh

0:28:19 Thomas: I asked this boy Ellington how he got to Meridian, and he said they took him by Livingston, and I asked him if he knew what that was for. Any immunity from the consequences of whatever he had done? No, sir. I said couldn't promise him anything. Anything? Was there anything said by you or them either that they would be responsible for whatever they would say? Yes, sir. I don't know at just what stage that was said, but it was said sometime during the conversation. Was there any kind of force, threats, or intimidation used by you or anyone there before they started to make a statement? None whatsoever. I spoke to them separately, but I was as kind as I knew how to be. Did they make any complaint about being questioned? No, sir. What expressions did they make with regard to your treatment of them? They seemed to be satisfied and and one or possibly more said that we dealt very kindly with them.

0:29:06 Thomas: They said to me that I didn't even look like I was mad. And so, he's you obviously a state's witness and Stennis asked him and boy, that's all seems above board. But, any rational person would be thinking, well, then why the fuck did they confess? Like they know that there's nothing in it for them. That's kind of weird. But anyway, I guess they're black. So, you you can just assume that they don't know anything. I don't Know. Now we get cross-examination by Mr. Clark. And a little put pin in Mr. Clark. Mr. Clark is the one out who is worth a damn, morally speaking. Speaking. I don't think he's worth much of a damn lawyerly speaking because of a lot of the story I'm going to tell later. But don't I say this now? Clark tried to get out of this at first. So they you know, they needed to assign them, but it was because he was sick.

0:29:52 Thomas: You know, that was the reason he gave. He's like, I'm, I've been dealing with sickness. He's an an older guy. He was a politician. I'll get into more of that later. He tried to get out of it. The judge said, no, like, no. You can't get out. Turns out that's really fucking important. Like that was a bit of a stroke of luck because he ended up being the one human being out of the three lawyers. That's part of the story that I find just so interesting. So anyway, that is Mr. Clark. There will be a lot more on that later So this is the cross- examination. I'm not going to read all of it, obviously, but here's a selection that I thought would be a bit important here question. I believe you said in the beginning, you explained to them that they might hang for it. You asked them if they knew they might hang for it. I asked them if they new the law was as such if they were found guilty of that crime. If they were convicted they would possibly hang for it.

0:30:37 Thomas: And they said they knew that. Do you know whether these boys had made a confession prior to that time prior to making the confession to you? Answer. I don't know. I had heard that. Did they make any complaint to you about that? Listen to this. I don't think they said anything about a confession. One of the boys, Shields, I believe, came in limping, and he kind of got on the box easy and looked like he was excited. I said, Henry, sit on that box. And he said, I can't. They strapped me pretty hard. I said.

0:31:04 Thomas: "Make yourself comfortable. Nobody is going to hurt you at all. All of us here are for your protection." "Did you understand that the confession that he had already made was brought about by putting him on a box and using a strap on him?" "I didn't understand anything about how it might have happened, but he stated that he couldn't sit down." "So he didn't tell you whether he confessed or not on account of that?" "No, sir, I didn't ask him anything about that." "You don't know whether he had confessed or not, but you had heard that he had?" "I had heard it, but you don't know under what circumstances?" "No, sir." And at this point, judge says, "I think the confession is admissible." And Clark says, "We object to it and accept to the ruling of the court."

0:31:04 Lydia: My god. So and this guy's a sheriff and he's saying, I have no idea how, why this happened, okay? Right, liar. Liar.

0:31:46 Thomas: Yes. He And so the jury comes back. And so they haven't heard any of that. And so now we go back to Stannis' questions of the sheriff. And he proceeds, this is long testimony, he proceeds to talk about all of the confessions. And no fucking videotape. There's no tape recordings, recordings, there's no, and that's an interesting thing in the law that I never understand either, because like, I guess that usually you don't do that anyway, because because of the whole, like, you need to be able to cross-examine whoever's making the accusation. So, you I guess this is how it's done, you just, this person says what they remember about the confessions, um, it's getting, so I don't know how a normal trial goes. I don't know a normal trail went in 1934 in Mississippi, you know, all those those questions. But he, uh, gives that story, and so, and so does Bryce Stevens, the sheriff of Lauderdale County, who was also there, um, and then also, this is great, the next witness after that, fucking Reverend Eugene Stevens, if you wonder why he was there, well, he's the sheriff's brother. Other.

0:32:47 Thomas: Cool. I've kind of coalesced the story from all of those alleged confessions. So here is the thrust of the story according to the sheriff's version of the defendant's confession, together, you know, that kind of thing. The defendants met up the night before and they hatched a plan to kill Raymond Stewart because he owed possibly one of them money. I can't even get a fucking clear idea of the motive. There's a couple different things stated. But it's essentially a money issue, that they're going to steal, know, kill this you guy and steal his money, which, if you're Ed Brown and you've lived and worked with this guy going on three years and you still live there, are you really going to just kill him and take his money and go back to your house and like, that's how are going to make money after that, it's not like you get the farm, don't you know, it's just, anyway, so that's the plan they hatch, uh, there's a lot of, know, corroboration in the details, there's also a couple contradictions.

0:32:45 Lydia: It's

0:33:49 Thomas: Both Brown and Ellington say that Shields hit Stewart first, but shields Shields maintains he never hit Stuart at all. And that's a consistent thing. Once again, I think I already said it, but Shields consistently maintains he never hit Stewart at all, and he maintains his innocence kind of the most. But in the end, does admit in these confessions to being a part of it. So they go there, they have weapons, including, you know, the chisel, the axe, and there's like some other, like, old timey like, wagon fucking standard, something or other. And they basically, you know, kill the guy. And then there's disagreement, but somebody searched the house for money, and then they didn't find money. And then Shields says Ed Brown took the lamp and poured oil and tried to burn the place to rid of the evidence.

0:34:39 Thomas: And that's why the lamp thing and the oil and the burnt clothing and possibly burnt cheek. I just want to point this out. According to, again, the sheriff and the confessions, Shields said he agreed to do this for $12.

Now keep in mind this is 1934, this is the Depression, so $12 is actually like a bit of money, but I wanted to point that out because of stuff that happens later around money that I just think is really interesting, but apparently the amount of money that someone would kill for is $12 here.

Then they say, you know, Shield says, okay, he left and then waited for the other two, and they never came, and then the other two are like, no, we just went home, just doesn't make any fucking sense, but we'll see why, obviously, that next sheriff basically corroborates this, there's not too many contradictions, he just adds like a few little things that don't matter that much, that, the you know, the confessions were definitely voluntary, I was there, they were totally voluntary, other sheriff told more about, like, how they move the body to the seed room after and setting it on fire. So they did add kind of different things there. And they also added in how, and Brown just, they felt so much better after confessing.

And then, but Shields didn't, which again, Shields was the one who pretty much maintained his innocence as much as possible, know, not even according to this white racist sheriff was he like relieved to tell the truth. The second sheriff mentions a cotton check. And I was trying so hard to figure out exactly what this would mean, but there's not much else about it. At first I was like, well, that can't be like a check, like a bank check, right? Because these wouldn't have, I doubt they would have bank accounts, like

0:36:16 Lydia: Oh.

0:36:16 Thomas: Sharecroppers and the black sharecropper in the 30s. But then I was researching, it's like, it doesn't necessarily have to be like a check check. It could also be like, a personal IOU, like that was also, and there's some other forms of, like, IOU that you could even take into town and use at a store, you know, like, ways there's different, that, you know, so somebody, alleged motivation is that one of the gentlemen was stiffed by Raymond Stewart. Like, they didn't get the money for work that he had done around the cotton thing. But it's like, it's extraordinarily bad, you would think you'd need to establish a motive.

But I think in the eyes of white people in Mississippi in 1934, just being like, they wanted money was pretty much, okay, they're black and they wanted, got it done, it's pretty much that's all they felt they needed to establish. And then, like I said, they have Reverend Eugene Stevens testify and corroborate all that. I want to read a tiny bit from their question.

"During all the time you were there, were any threats or anything like that used against these boys?" "There absolutely wasn't, and besides that, they They were told we were there to protect them and we're going to see that they had a fair trial and for them to feel easy."

0:36:26 Lydia: Uh-huh. That's

0:37:19 Thomas: Were they told that they would be given any kind of immunity from what they told or did? No, sir. Were their statements free and voluntary on their part? I don't see why they shouldn't be.

0:37:28 Lydia: An interesting response.

0:37:29 Thomas: Yeah. Just another thing I wanted to point out again with all the content notes, re-upping those, just one random sentence where he's talking about like, like, how they entered the house, and he says, the two darkies, Shields and Ellington, went in a side entrance by a chimney, I think. He, I guess meaning Brown, went around and waited in the hall and met them there, but it's, I just found that interesting, like, Ed Brown must be a lighter skinned black man, and like, he he prefers to the other two, and this is a reverend, by the way.

0:37:57 Lydia: A man of the cloth.

0:37:58 Thomas: Yeah, reverend says the two darkeys over there, Shields and Ellington, which is, I just found that interesting. Like that kind of colorism, you know, like even among these racist white people, they're they, pointing out that colorism and noting like the, yeah, exactly.

0:38:01 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Further. Differentiating. But yeah, seriously.

0:38:11 Thomas: I just find that like, again, there's so many of these little tidbits that you're like, God, just get a picture of what the fuck this horrible place in time was. And that's basically it for the state's case. The state rests after that. Yep. State rests.

0:38:23 Lydia: It Was Like a two hour, like, wow.

0:38:27 Thomas: Could have been less. Probably took me longer to say what happened than what happened. Like I could have just probably should have read the whole transcript. No, there is some stuff that went on for a while.

0:38:29 Lydia: Wow. Sorry, that's nuts for three defendants that are being considered for the death penalty.

0:38:40 Thomas: Well, in their minds, they confessed. So that's, they just basically, Stennis thought, well, they confess. I just need to establish that they confessed and yeah, yeah, exactly. These people will say that it was totally free and voluntary. Bam, done.

0:38:47 Lydia: I just need this guy and his brother to... Wow. The

0:38:55 Thomas: And at this point I was thinking, ah, shit, that's how, okay. So that is how this happened. Happened, the jury didn't hear much about the confessions because they were out of the room and like yeah, okay, they heard, yeah.

0:39:07 Lydia: Above board version.

0:39:09 Thomas: Yeah. And that's, fuck, okay, that's how that this happened. But we're not even close to done with the trial transcript. We're Uh, we've got a lot to go. In fact, there's so much more, I think I'm going to call a bit of an audible here and, uh. Trying to arrange these in the best way we can. There's sort of some odds and ends here we can talk about because the next part is very long. So I think that'll be part part three in terms of the rest of the transcript. But I wanted to, I can't help it. I wanted think to a little bit about, look, I know, you know, literally everybody then knew that these confessions were bullshit, like obviously.

0:39:09 Lydia: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:39:47 Thomas: And so there is always the thing of like, you see it with Trump too, where you're like, well, we all know this is a lie, but you still can't helped debunking it. You know, it's just like, I don't know if anyone believes this, but I can't help thinking about it. And there is a part of me that even though this is a 1934 murder case and it's almost impossible to know what happened and there's so little information, a little part of that can't try to think about like, what did happen here? You know, because the guy was murdered. Like that is real. Raymond Stewart was murdered, yeah. And I'm reading these alleged confessions that I've just told you about and like I'm poking holes in it, but I one element of true crime and I get why people are so in into it. I do love the you, the mystery part of it, like detaching from all of it.

I love the logical puzzle and I do, I for example, I'm do poking holes in this thing, but you also have to remember that you can't poke a hole in it that couldn't be filled because again, somebody killed him. And I see that a lot where, where it's throwing like spaghetti at the wall is to try to debunk like any story. And it's like, well, then that would, that would mean nobody killed. Like you've just debunked, you've over-bunked.

0:40:14 Lydia: Someone did it. Yeah.

0:40:49 Lydia: Oh,

0:40:49 Thomas: You've over debunk, completely debunk. You got to leave some bunk in there. And so have some thoughts about it in a this, few more details about the alleged confessions. But I also, one of the main points I wanted to make is I mean, essentially all three of these guys are sharecroppers. I think. I don't have that much detail about Henry Shields. So Ed Brown was kind of the closest with Raymond Stewart and was literally a sharecropper, lived pretty close to his house, but on his property, pretty close relationship there.

Yank Ellington lived further away, it's said that he didn't work with Raymond as much, but it does seem like it's, it's because he kind of had his own station out there, maybe like he had his own kind of mules or something. Not his, obviously, everything, everything, no black person owns fucking anything in this world, but, they're like, Raymond Stewart's mules. And it seems like he does more work further away, but it's still like work for Raymond Stewart shields. And this is a little interesting detail, I might've mentioned this earlier, but Shields is the one that says he's lived with a number of people, so maybe he's like kind of sharecropped around, you know, a little bit.

0:40:50 Lydia: Over-funked.

0:41:19 Lydia: Yeah, right. Okay.

0:41:57 Thomas: And one of them is Henry Lavender, and I found that interesting, um, but I, I guess not presently, because we covered he lived on Mrs. Ethridge's property, it does seem like, I don't know if he was technically sharecropping, not enough information, there is reference made to like him working for them, but it might have been, you know, some different kind of thing yeah I don't know, so anyway, that starting with that information, because you looked a little bit into just sharecropping in general.

0:42:15 Lydia: In other, in another capacity. Yeah Yeah so when slavery ended, enslaved people didn't have their own land. They didn't know have anything. They don't have anywhere to go. And the slave owners, slave the slave holders, simultaneously had now these huge expanses of land and crops and no one to work them. And they could not wrap their minds around how to harvest without slaves, I guess. So they came up with this system that had been used a little bit before the Civil War had started, but it really just boomed here, where they said, how can we exploit people without enslaving

0:42:29 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, not allowed to do slavery, but can we pay you $0 to do all the work?

0:43:05 Lydia: Them. Yeah. Yeah, literally. Infrequently was anyone offered any money. It was usually trading your labor for a share of the crops, hence sharecroppers. You did not own as a black person, you did not owe any of the animals you needed to work the land. You didn't own any of the tools. You didn't own seeds. You didn't owe any housing, nothing. And the folks who did own the land, the landowners, maintained the books the entire time. And you're talking about a generation, multiple generations of people who might be illiterate because they didn't have the opportunity to pursue any education while they were enslaved. Is the landowner being truthful? How am I doing with, you know, what I'm making, quote unquote, through this?

0:43:05 Thomas: Yes, okay, cool. Yeah. And so, by the way, maybe. Maybe someone did have a complaint, I'm sure they had a complaint against him for, or you could have. There's no evidence for Ed Brown. There is some evidence for like Yank, I think might have had a disagreement allegedly, but we'll more on that later.

0:43:54 Lydia: Yeah.

0:44:06 Lydia: So the tools that they needed to work the land, the seeds, everything like that, it wasn't like the land owner offered those up out of the goodness of their heart to work their crop their property, sharecroppers often would have to rent those items from the landlord and then pay back with high interest rates. And so you have this situation where individuals are never able to get out. They're enslaved again. Again.

0:44:16 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah, I was gonna say, so it's almost like slavery is what you're saying yeah

0:44:35 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, it's basically the exact same thing, except now there's like a ledger that they're writing down numbers in. So I found actually like an older contract. It's not from the 30s, but I thought it was pretty interesting. It was from 1867

0:44:50 Thomas: It's like one of the first ones

0:44:51 Lydia: Yeah! Yeah! The said Cooper Hughes Friedman, with his Friedman, of course, with his wife and one other woman, and the said Charles Roberts with his wife Hannah and one boy are to work on said farm and to cultivate 40 acres in corn and 20 acres in cotton, to assist in putting the fences on said firm in good order and to keep them so, and to do all other work on set farm necessary to be done to keep the same in good crop, and to be under the control and directions of said I.G. Bailey and to receive for their said services one half of the cotton and one third of the corn and fodder raised by them on said farm in said year 1867. And the said Charles Roberts Friedman with his wife Hannah further agrees and binds themselves to do the washing and ironing and all other necessary housework for said IG Bailey and his family during said year, 1867, and to received for their said services $50 in money at the expiration of said year 1867. $50 in 1867, you want to take a, to make guess on how much that would be in 2023?

0:44:51 Thomas: Yeah 57 dollars, no, I mean

0:45:58 Lydia: You low-balled it a little bit.

0:45:58 Thomas: Isn't that thousands of dollars

0:46:00 Lydia: No, it's like, it is like a thousand dollars. So doing, can you imagine doing all of that work for a thousand dollars. Meanwhile, you're paying rent on all the things that you need to do to do all this work for them.

0:46:00 Thomas: Oh okay, yeah I was gonna say, I I was doubting that they would even end up with that money, it would be probably deducted off of other things

0:46:18 Lydia: Oh, yeah. No, They probably wouldn't. And so a lot of times, if you weren't able to pay your debt, based off of what you were supposedly earning versus what you rented and what you owe to the landowner, often they would say, "Oh, just work the next season for me towards your debt," right? And then you have this indebted servitude going on here. And so, you know, I could sit here and kind of share you stats and figures and everything, um, but I actually stumbled on a documentary that, um, I think does a little more justice, that I'd like you to play. Just a little clip from.

0:46:19 Thomas: Yeah What an age we live in, 1960. We can just something that went crazy. All right.

0:46:52 Lydia: Yeah, from CBS News.

0:46:57 Clip: Aileen King, I saw your children yesterday at the Okeechobee camp. Why didn't you put them in the nursery? I didn't make them have to pay for it. How much does it cost to put them there? Eighty-five cents. Eighty five cents. That's right. Aileen, what time did you come out the field this morning? Six o'clock. What time did we get home? About three, three, four o' clock. Six this morning to four o´clock this afternoon. That's fine. How much did you earn? A dollar. One dollar? That's right. One dollar. Is that because the beans were of poor quality? That's correct. Has this happened before? That's true. Uh, how much will your food cost you today?

0:47:39 Clip: About two dollars. Aileen, how old are you? Twenty-nine. How many children do you have? Eighteen.

0:47:48 Clip: How old were you when you first started working in the fields? Eight. You've been working 21 years in the field? That's what. Bob, Aileen, do you ever think you'll be able to get out of this kind of work? Yes.

0:48:00 Lydia: Yeah.

0:48:01 Thomas: Also, I mean, interestingly, that puts her starting work there around 1939. I mean how crazy is it that the period we're we're talking about, it seems so old timey, but then it's like, oh, well, we can watch video footage of someone who was like, 21 years she'd been working there starting when she She was eight. And it's like, yep, 1960. Things were still not great. But wow.

0:48:14 Lydia: Of an interview.

0:48:23 Lydia: And I heard your your reaction to how many kids she had and my jaw literally dropped when I was listening to that. 14 children by the the age of 29. And prior to this interview, he's actually chatting with her kids. And and I'm not playing that there. But it was it was very sad. They basically just stay at the house and try to take care of each other. And there's, you Know, like no food. There was a hole in one of their beds. And he asked the one of the sons, Hey, what where'd that hole come from?

0:49:00 Lydia: And she made a dollar picking beans because they weren't deemed to be good enough quality, and food for the day is going to cost two dollars.

0:48:42 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah,

0:49:09 Lydia: So like what kind of life is this? It's not it's not a life.

0:49:12 Thomas: But don't worry. It's OK, because now we have illegal immigrants who we pay comparable amounts of money to do that work. So we're all better now. So that little detour on sharecropping, That brings me to something that has always bothered me about these stupid confessions. Again, knowing that they're obviously bullshit, but it's still like even trying to figure out who, who done it. It's always bothered me because, I'm going to actually read some of the testimony of the sheriff of the confessions, you And this is Stennis questioning. Is the first sheriff answering. He says, Henry Shields said they met that afternoon sometime down the road.

He didn't undertake to say just where. These boys, Ellington and Brown, told him they were going to kill Mr. Stewart for some money that he owed them for cotton checks, that he wouldn't give them the money and that there are going to have it. And they wanted him to help kill him. He agreed to help them and they were to meet about midnight down at Ed Brown's house. They did meet down there at Ed brown's house and talk the matter over and left and went to Mr. Stewart's. Henry Shields and Ellington went directly to the west end of the house by the chimney and the door to the bedroom where Mr.

0:49:20 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

0:50:24 Thomas: Stuart was sleeping. Question, you say that they said Ellingon and Henry Shields went in the residence by an entrance near the bedroom. It is right by the chimney, and there's a door there, and the steps come up to the bedroom. I asked them about the bed, and they said it was over in the corner of the room, and they could see his form in the bed. Ellington said that Henry hit him the first lick with the stick, and Henry said Ellingdon hit the first lick.

Each one said the other made entrance to the room first. Mr. Stewart jumped up, or undertook to get up, and Ellingston said, after the lick with the stick, he jumped up and Shields hit him with an axe. He jumped up and said something. They never did tell exactly what he said. He undertook to go out the door into the hallway, and Shield struck a match and give it to him and told him to light a lamp. Who did that? Shields. Ellington said that about Shields.

Ellingdon said Shields hit him with an ax and struck a matching, told him the light lamp, and he followed him in the hallway, and Shield said him again with the ax and he run after him with the light.

0:51:18 Thomas: Mr. Stewart started out the end of the hall into another little entrance, I call it the back hall, and he met this Ed Brown. He went around the house and came in the back and was in the hallway and had torn open a chest and secured a foot foot axe, and he said he hit him with that. Who did? Ed Brown. Shield says yank hit him with a stick again and knocked the lamp chimney off. Oh, I might have had that wrong, by the way.

I thought they hit him the lamp, but maybe the story is somebody knocked the ramp up about the time he fell against the tool chest. When Ed Brown hit him, he fell. Ellington said he hit him one or two licks with a chisel, a wood chisel with a wood handle, about eight inches long. I saw that chisel there myself. I asked them if they hit him with any more after he fell, and they said they didn't.

Shields and Ed Brown took the lamp and went in the house, and and looked in there and in the closet and all around for money, but he didn't find any money. He came back there, and Ellington, Shields put the body in the cottonseed room. The door was right at the end of the tool chest where the body fell across it. He said he got down under the man's arm and pulled him up, and his head was somewhere near. Who did that? Shields did that. He said that himself, that he pulled him out and his hand was right there, there and he had his arms under the other man's arms, and Ellington took him by the body or legs and pushed the door open and dumped him on the pile.

0:52:47 Thomas: So, that's the bulk of it. There's a little more I'm going to read. But, like, it's always bothered me that, how in the world? These are three incredibly able-bodied, hard-working, share-fucking croppers. One is 20, the others, they're not, none of them older than like 30, I think, I forget the exact age, but 20s and in the 30s, and you're telling me, a, they decided to get together and plot to do this, and they're like, all right, what should we, what should be killing with? Well, I got a stick, an axe, and then, yeah, and a wood chisel? Okay, cool, let's go do it. They get around his sleeping body and they're like, all right, let's try the stick first. Like, what, what in the, how would anyone take this seriously?

0:53:16 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Wood chisel.

0:53:31 Lydia: Yeah.

0:53:31 Thomas: And, mind you, I think I already mentioned that Ed, Ed Brown had Stewart's gun, like still to this time, like a shotgun that he just, let him use all the time. Why wouldn't the plot be, all right, we're gonna kill him, I've got a shotgun, okay, let's go shotgun him.

0:53:36 Lydia: Yeah.

0:53:45 Lydia: Yeah, that was my thought, too. Like, if he has a weapon already at his disposal and is also owned by the person that they're murdering, I mean, like,

0:53:45 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. And, like, the other thing that really bothered me is, like, you're telling me they tried to burn the house down and couldn't, like, I imagine these men would be very competent with things like that. They, they know the crop that is being, you know, the cotton crop, they know all, they would know better than anybody, everybody, how any of that shit would work, what would be flammable, what wouldn't, building fires, burning brush, doing all that kind of normal farm work, like that stuff that they would be highly competent at. So you're telling me three strong young Black men sharecroppers couldn't even kill a guy who was sleeping, then they can't even burn down the house, and then furthermore, if they were going to burn down in house, then that would make me think, like, the gun's an even better thing. Like, I don't know how good forensics was, but it's like, yeah, shoot him and then burn it to a crisp. And then, you know, you wouldn't be able to find anything.

0:54:00 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

0:54:41 Lydia: Leave the gun. Mm hmm.

0:54:42 Thomas: Yeah. None of that makes any fucking sense. Here's another stupid part. This part is unbelievably stupid. This is still Stennis, by the way. It's not like cross-examination.

0:54:42 Lydia: Yeah, I OK.

0:54:53 Thomas: Question, what if anything was said about a jumper with blood on All it I knew about it was what they told me. Question, what did they say about it to you on that occasion? I asked them, and Ed said that that was his jumper and he gave it to Henry down at the house, and Henry admitted that Ed told him to put Mr.

0:55:22 Lydia: What? What?

0:55:23 Thomas: Adcock, did either one of those boys say anything about the reason for the jumper being exchanged between them or anything like that? Henry Shields said Ed Brown gave it to him and told him to put it on over his to keep off any bloodstains. And they left that jumper there at Mr. Stewart's house. Yes, sir. That's what he said. I asked him about it being found at his house and he said he didn't know anything about that. I ask him about the ax and he says he didn't know anything. This is still Stennis questioning his own witness. What?

0:55:42 Lydia: Yeah. Huh. He's like, oh, shit.

0:55:50 Thomas: This so obviously and clearly reads like someone has fed them information about a jumper and then they're trying to piece it in. Yeah, no, he put it on over his. Then we did a little little fashion show. We each tried it on, saw how it looked like, what the fuck are you talking about? And, keep in mind how absolutely terrible all this is. Here's the cross-examination by the absolutely definitely competent lawyers who are trying real hard. Cross- examination by Mr. Spinks. Mr. Adcock, did I understand you to say that each of the boys admitted they went to Mr. Stewart's house that night? Yes, sir.

Did each one of them admit that they were present when Mr. Stuart was being attacked by one or the other of the three? Yes, sir, all were in the house, two in one room, and the other waiting at the end of the hall. Question, for instance, when Ed Brown was undertaking to make his narration of what happened, was he interrupted and charged by either of the others telling a falsehood on either of the others? No, sir. Brown and Ellington both said that Henry had the axe and he denied it.

0:55:58 Lydia: Yep.

0:56:44 Thomas: That is the axe they claimed he hit with and Henry denied hitting him at all. Did they give sufficient description so that the axe was pictured in your mind? Yes, Sir. Sir, I asked Henry to describe the axe and he said it was an axe with black letters on the side. And near the axe, it was busted a little piece. I asked him if it had a new handle and he says it was pretty new. Did Henry admit to having the axe that night? No, sir. He denied having it? Yes, sir! What did he say about the axe? I asked if he had been confronted with an axe since he had be in jail and he had said he had. I asked his if this was his jumper and he has said yes, sir I asked it was the one he had on and he say it was. I asked about the ax and he denied having.

0:57:46 Thomas: Say they had a meeting that afternoon. All three of them said that, and they said that their understanding was they would meet that night at Ed Brown's house. Witness dismissed. That's it. That's the entirety of cross-examination of this incredibly key witness. Nothing else. Nothing. Like, are you telling me, three, three strong men could not kill a man in bed? Is that what you're telling me?

0:58:00 Lydia: Yikes. Yeah. An older man, right? Because he supposedly has.

0:58:10 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. He's always in the 60s, I think. What? And then they also couldn't make a fire happen, you know. And and

0:58:12 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even though they have oil like right there.

0:58:18 Thomas: Yeah. And like there's no rush. It's not like there's a, you know, an alarm system and the cops are coming, like it's the middle of the night. So, you know, I'm not going to spend too much time on the speculating, but I can't help but just wonder, like, what happened here, you know?

0:58:20 Lydia: Yeah? Yeah, I know.

0:58:33 Thomas: And there's, well, there's a little more information you're going to get later, but this strikes me as someone almost strikes me as like, could it have been a woman? You know, it's like, you've got somebody where they've got the jump on the guy and they've got an ax, but they're not able to kill him. And I don't know, we don't get any real forensic information as to, like, well, are we positive it's multiple people with weapons or one person with a series of weapons, you know?

0:58:34 Lydia: Know.

0:58:46 Lydia: Oh, interesting. Hmm. Right.

0:59:00 Lydia: Yeah.

0:59:00 Thomas: We don't, we don't have any idea about that, because, like, I could imagine if it was a, I don't know, about a woman or what, but just like someone weaker, someone not, you know, obviously strong and capable like these men were, then maybe it's like you hit him, but he's not injured, like he's still kind of alive and making his way about the house, and maybe you find other things to try to hit him with, you know? That makes a little more sense, you know, than, like, Like, for some reason, you fail to kill a guy with an axe who's sleeping. Like, I'm pretty sure if I wanted to kill somebody with an ax who was sleeping, I would do it in pretty much one go. Like, that wouldn't be, like, hard at all. Let alone if there was three of me or something. Like,that's not happening.

0:59:35 Lydia: Yeah. Or like, at the very least, the injuries, the, because, I mean, he, he was quite injured, but he still managed to survive a significant number of hours after being horribly beaten, and and I feel like, yeah, like to your point, if you were really trying, trying to kill somebody, you, you would get a little closer at least, um, if you were one of those three. So yeah, I don't know, I don't, I buy it at all.

0:59:46 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I really wonder what happened. I will say, and more on this later, but the only person that I think could have been involved was Shields. Maybe that could make sense, um, didn't have as much knowledge, that's the other thing, Brown would have known, like, whether or not he had money, where, where he kept it, how that was gonna go, the part where they didn't find any money is interesting, that that strikes me as, like, well, maybe whoever did it actually did steal money, but because they couldn't find that money at any of the black guys' places, they have to say he didn't happen, and you know, Like maybe that's what's going on. So I don't know, just in terms of the whodunit, there's for no way it was Ed Brown. Like, I don't think Ed Brown was at all involved. I really don't. There's also a thing that's interesting about how the confession went. This is later, Brown hadn't been admitting anything. And then he finds out Shields had implicated him. That, then Ed Brown said, oh, he's lying on me, he did it.

And, like, part of me is like, I don't, maybe, maybe Shields did do it, and and, you know, and then implicated, but anyway, or who knows who it was, but I sure as shit know it was not three strong men who failed to kill a guy who was sleeping and then couldn't even burn down the place.

I don't understand why, like, there's no time pressure that I know of, unless there's, you know, were there people there, someone in the house that, that we don't know about, some reason you would have had to hurry?

1:00:19 Lydia: Yeah yeah

1:01:21 Thomas: Because if I'm trying to burn down a house to hide evidence of a murder I committed, I'm making sure that thing burns down. Like, I we don'T have any witnesses, any eyewitnesses who said they chased anyone off or did anything, you KNOW? So, what a weird thing. I don'T know. Somebody did it, but it feels like somebody was not, capable. As Like, competent as these men definitely would be. Interesting. That's all speculative. And, you know, we can continue speculating if we want. But what is not at all speculative is that these confessions problematic, to say the least. And so next time on Where There's Woke, the state has rested its case or has it. And let's see what the defense has to say. There's so much more.

1:01:26 Lydia: Right. Right.