PARDON
On the twenty-sixth day of April, 1913, Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl employed in an Atlanta pencil factory, was found murdered. The people of Georgia were stunned and outraged by the crime. Suspicion soon focused upon the factory’s superintendent, Leo M. Frank, who was charged with her killing.
The funeral of Mary Phagan, the ensuing police inquiry, and the trial of Leo Frank were all chronicled in the newspapers in the florid and sensational style of the age. Public feeling was stirred to a fever pitch. During the trial, crowds thronged the courtroom and pressed about the courthouse grounds. For his own protection, Frank was confined in the jail while the proceedings continued. On August 25, 1913, he was found guilty and sentenced to death.
When his efforts in the courts proved unavailing, the case was laid before Governor John M. Slaton. The Governor confronted intense and conflicting pressures. Many citizens demanded that the sentence be carried out, and in some quarters the agitation was inflamed by prejudice against Frank as a Jew and as a factory superintendent from the North. Troubled by serious doubts as to Frank’s guilt, Governor Slaton, on June 21, 1915, commuted the sentence from death to life imprisonment. In so doing, he spared Frank the gallows and preserved, in principle, the possibility of further judicial review.
That hope was short-lived. On the night of August 16, 1915, a band of armed men seized Frank by force from the State Prison at Milledgeville, bore him to Cobb County, and, in the early hours of the following morning, lynched him.
This act of mob violence cut short the legal process and forever ended any further attempt to establish Frank’s innocence or confirm his guilt. It arose out of, and was made possible by, the failure of the State of Georgia to safeguard the prisoner in its custody. Adding yet another injustice to the wrong already done, the State did not thereafter bring any of the lynchers to account.
In 1983, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles considered a petition for a pardon premised upon a claim of innocence. The Board did not find conclusive proof, beyond all doubt, that Leo Frank was innocent—a standard of certainty which, in any event, is extraordinarily difficult to attain in a case seven decades old.
STATE BOARD OF PARDONS AND PAROLES
Wayne Snow, Jr., Chairman
Mrs. Mamie B. Reese, Member
James T. Morris, Member
Mobley Howell, Member
Michael H. Wing, Member
For the Board:
Wayne Snow, Jr., Chairman
You can check out the 2025 newly revised book of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank Case from the 1987 older version by Mary Phagan-Kean, Now Available on Amazon Books.
WEBSITE: www.LittleMaryPhagan.com
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