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Assault in the courts (13)
Magistrates transferred Harry Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions to be prosecuted for "simple" (misdemeanor) assault, involving a lesser level of violence, and sent four of the twelve arrested, involved in half the assaults for which an arrest was made, to 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. Gordon, charged with assaulting a police officer and initially associated with the Communists arrested at the beginning of the disorder, was initially reported in the press as likely to be sent to the grand jury. However, police ultimately could not produce evidence to support a charge of felony assault. They did continue to investigate his case for far longer than anyone else arrested in the disorder, with his trial the last, seven months later. Gordon was convicted, but the offense and his sentence are unknown.
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. All three of the others were indicted. Despite the prevalence of plea bargaining in this period, they all went on trial in the Court of General Sessions. Only one jury voted for a conviction, of James Hughes for throwing a rock that hit Detective Henry Roge, but only for misdemeanor assault. The judge sentenced him to only three months in the Workhouse, indicating that he and the jury both believed Hughes' target had been a store window, not the detective. Juries acquitted the other two men put on trial, Paul Boyett and Isaac Daniels, both in cases of assaults by Black men on white men. That was not a circumstance in which white juries usually voted for acquittal. As the cases involved alleged assaults by groups, identification of the defendant as the person who committed the assault was likely the issue. In Boyett's case, he testified he had been a spectator, not a participant in the assault, arrested because he was hit by shots fired by police. In Daniels' case, police did not arrest him at the scene, but later, when the man he allegedly assaulted saw him at Harlem Hospital. Daniels' wife, however, testified he had been at home at the time of the assault.
The legal process thus further diminished the interpersonal violence of the disorder: even the small proportion of arrests for assaults largely proved to not have apprehended those responsible for the violence. The resulting absence of convictions for assault meant that the attacks reported in the immediate aftermath of the disorder did not carry forward into later accounts, making it possible to form impressions of what happened that omitted that violence, particularly the interracial assaults.