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Completing the legal process
Unreported, the final eight of those arrested during the disorder trickled out of the Magistrates courts over the next three weeks as police completed investigations. Magistrate Ford disposed of the last of those arrested in the jurisdiction of the Washington Heights court on April 9, when Charles Alston was sufficiently recovered from injuries suffered fleeing police to appear and have the assault charges against him dismissed, the same outcome as the three men arrested with him. Magistrate Renaud did not dispose of the last case before him in the Harlem court for nearly two more weeks. The extended police investigation of that case likely was a result of the defendant, Frank Wells, having ties to the Communist Party. However, police did not produce evidence to support the allegation that Wells had broken the window of a store on 125th Street, resulting in the charge against him being reduced to disorderly conduct. On April 20, a month after the first of those arrested in the disorder appeared in his court, Renaud convicted Wells and sent him to the workhouse for 30 days.
The grand jury continued to vote for charges in all of the final [20] cases presented to them, as they had with almost all the previous cases, but those decisions did not signal that they had been presented evidence of serious/felonious acts. The grand jury sent only seventeen of those arrested in the disorder to the Court of General Sessions charged with felonies, and only one of the final twenty cases. All the remainder, and just over half of all the cases related to the disorder, the grand jury sent to be tried on lesser misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions. The last case related to the disorder presented to the grand jury, on April 23, was the one case presented after March 27 for which the grand jury voted an indictment. Paul Boyett was charged with assaulting a white man, the only such offense to be presented to the grand jury.
The combination of cases sent from the grand jury and those sent directly to the court by magistrates made trials in the Court of Special Sessions the proceeding in which most of the remaining cases were decided. Those [31?] trials received almost no attention from the press even as the panel of three magistrates who presided convicted three out of four of those who appeared. Eight of nine men not convicted appeared in the court in the weeks after March 27. A single trial, of the four Communists, produced half of those acquittals, two months after the disorder, on June 21. A further five months later, the final trial did result in a conviction, of the other white man arrested at the beginning of the disorder, Harry Gordon.
Most of the twelve sent to the CGS did not go to trial, instead accepting the plea bargains that prosecutors offered as a standard practice at this time as had Carl Jones, Hezekiah Wright, Joseph Wade and Thomas Jackson in earlier. [result was that those men were not convicted of felonies but, like those in lower court, of misdemeanors. [Only Larry pled to a felony = record – and as such one of few of those arrested who fitted that stereotype]. Trials on felony charges produced similar outcomes. Ackerman tried, March 28. Ford and Moore soon after, April 1. Joseph Hughes tried a week later, having withdrawn from a plea bargain. It would be almost two months later before the final trial in the CGS, that of Paul Boyett.
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- "One More Indicted in Harlem Riot," New York Evening Journal, March 29, 1935, 3.
- "Riot Looting Brings a New Indictment," New York Times, March 29, 1935, 9.
- "1 More Indicted in Harlem Riots," New York American, March 29, 1935, 11
- Calendar of Court Appearances, March 28-May 29, 1935
- "Freed on Riot Charge," New York Amsterdam News, April 6, 1935, 14.