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Injustice kills another Jew Leo Frank in the article The Fate of Leo Frank by Leonard Dinnerstein did not receive a fair trial. I believe that the ghost of Leo Frank should haunt forever the families of those who convicted and lynched him. Prejudice convicted Leo Frank, not the evidence presented at his trial. In July, 1913, Leo Frank, a Georgian pencil manufacturing company co-owner and manager, was indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Mary Phangan, a thirteen year old girl from Marietta, Georgia employed in Franks factory. Pagan was on her way to the Confederacy Memorial Day parade when she stopped by the factory to collect her wages. She did not arrive at the parade.
The next series of events took four weeks to try in the Georgia courts. The principle witness at Franks trial was Jim Conley, a janitor at the pencil factory. Prior to the trial, Conley gave four affidavits. With each he changed his story. Conley bore witness at the trial of Franks indiscretions with his female employees. He also wrote notes that incriminated himself, allegedly at the direction of Frank.
His testimony was always inconsistent and his performance on the witness stand appeared coached. Everything about this black man seemed contrived. Other forces working against Frank were his own lawyers. Luther Z. Rosser and Ruben R. Arnold were supposedly two of the best attorneys of the day, comparable to Johnny Cochran of the O.
J. Simpson trial fame. Rosser and Arnold, I believe, did not defend Frank to the best of their ability. By not taking advantage of the great number of inconsistencies in the evidence presented by the prosecution they allowed facts to go un clarified.
They did not use evidence collected by the police investigation which could have conveyed that necessary shadow of doubt to the jury. They did not ask for a change of venue for a trial which was, before it even convened, being tried in the local papers. The greatest and most decisive of the forces working against Frank was prejudice. Frank was from New York, an industrialist, and a Jew. Any of these prejudices in the south in the year nineteen-thirteen was bad enough. But the combination of the three proved lethal to Leo Frank.
He was failed by the system, and lynched by a mob that was angered that the Governor of Georgia commuted Frank s sentence. Christians in Georgia were prejudiced against the Jewish people because the Jews had killed their king nineteen hundred years earlier. The citizens of Atlanta were prejudiced against an industrialist because factories and industry would undermine the southern agrarian way of life. Leo Frank was convicted and was serving his time on a farm detail when word of his sentence commutation was let out. A group of locals raided the farm and drove Frank to Marietta where they lynched him.
His attackers were never identified, though the local community more than likely could have named them. This is the injustice Frank received. Prejudice was, I believe, the deciding factor in the case of Leo Frank. And as long as there is prejudice in the state and local governments there will always be a Leo Frank being sacrificed on the alter intolerance and bigotry.
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Research essay sample on Forces Working Against Frank Working Against Frank Leo
