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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Assaults in the courts (13)

While fifty-four assaults appear in newspaper reports and hospital records, only thirteen men appeared in court charged with assault in relation to eight of those reported assaults. There are no details of one of those assaults other than that the same man, Vito Capozzio, made the complainant against two men, Richard Jackson and Salathel Smith, who were arrested by the same police officer. In the docket book the charge against them is annotated "fight," suggesting they may been arrested for fighting each other rather than having been involved in the disorder. Four other Black men arrested for assault allegedly shot at a police officer, but that event appears to not have occurred, so only their arrest and appearance in court, not the assault, are included as events. One of those men, Charles Alston, was injured fleeing police, and did not appear in court until almost three weeks after his arrest.

Magistrates held four of the twelve arrested, involved in half the assaults for which an arrest was made, for the Grand Jury. James Smitten, who was arraigned in the Night Court during the disorder, did not appear in any other sources, so the outcome of his prosecution was unknown. Of the men prosecuted for Disorderly Conduct in the Magistrates Court other than Richard Jackson and Salathel Smith, Rivers Wright was allegedly part of a group that attacked a white man. The the others, charged as a group with shooting at police, although there was no evidence anyone was injured and no weapons were found in the men's possession. The magistrate transferred Harry Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions, to be prosecuted for "simple" (misdemeanor) assault, involving a lesser level of violence. Of the four men Magistrates held for the grand jury, one, Douglas Cornelius, had no case file in the District Attorney's records, and there was no information on the outcome of the prosecution in other sources.

Strikingly few of the prosecutions produced convictions: Magistrate Renaud convicted Richard Jackson, Salathel Smith and Rivers Wright of the lesser offense of disorderly conduct, and a jury convicted James Hughes of third degree (misdemeanor) assault for throwing a rock that hit Detective Henry Roge. None of those men received a prison sentence: Magistrate Renaud sent Jackson and Smith to the workhouse for two days, and Wright for ten days, while a judge sent Hughes to the Workhouse for three months. Those sentences reflected the limited violence of the assaults in the disorder in terms of both the lack of weapons and the limited injuries inflicted. Magistrate Ford acquitted all four of the group of men who allegedly shot at police of the lesser charge of disorderly conduct, unsurprisingly given the lack of any evidence they had committed a crime. Despite the prevalence of plea bargaining at this time, none of these men pled guilty to lesser offenses. Juries also acquitted two men put on trial, both in cases of assaults by Black men on white men. This was not a circumstance in which juries usually voted for acquittal unless there was a question about the identification of the defendant as the person who committed the assault. As the cases involved alleged assaults by groups, identification was likely an issue.
 

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