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Cases in the Court of General Sessions (17)
Only five of those men went before a jury, all three arrested for assault and only two arrested for looting. Ten men arrested for looting accepted plea bargains offered by prosecutors and two had the charges against them dismissed by a judge. Those outcomes were typical for felony prosecutions in this period, upwards of 90% of which were disposed of by plea bargains. Only James Hughes was convicted by a jury, of assault. Arnold Ford accepted a plea bargain offered during his trial for looting. Juries acquitted the other two men charged with assault, Isaac Daniels and Paul Boyett, and a judge directed the acquittal of Joseph Moore. The conviction rate (12 of 17, 70%) was slightly lower than the rates in both the Magistrates courts (39 of 50, 78%) and the Court of Special Sessions (26 of 32, 81%).
Ten men arrested for looting pled guilty to misdemeanor charges, seven to petit larceny and three to unlawful entry. Those offenses suggest different gaps in the evidence against the men: the charge of petit larceny did not require evidence of breaking into a business only of taking merchandise, while the charge of unlawful entry did not require evidence of taking merchandise circumstances only of entering a business. The consequences of both pleas, however, were the same, a sentence of up to one year of imprisonment. Arnold Ford later reported being pressured into his plea, telling a Probation officer he pled guilty "because he was told to do so and that as a matter of fact he is not guilty and did not take part in the riot and that he found the goods in the street." The officer described Ford as "brooding over his conviction," suggesting he regretted the plea. A judge allowed James Hughes to withdraw his guilty plea after the intervention of Black clergyman, circumstances that suggest he might have agreed to that plea under pressure or without adequate advice. Thomas Jackson, Arthur Merritt and Hezekiah Wright denied their guilt to Probation officers after their conviction without indicating why they had agreed to plead guilty. Those cases raise questions about how effectively the men's lawyers represented them. None of the men who agreed to plea bargains were among those recorded as having Black lawyers. Only Merritt's lawyer, Albert Halperin, was identified in the legal records, but no information was found about him. Edward Larry entered the final guilty plea, to the felony charge of attempted grand larceny, rather than face trial on a charge of robbery, an offense that carried a maximum sentence four times as long as the offense to which he pled guilty. Larry was the only person arrested during the disorder convicted of a felony.
The first of the trials did not take place until April, which perhaps contributed to the lack of newspaper stories about proceedings that would have offered the most extensive legal examination of events in the disorder. Joseph Moore and Arnold Ford appear to have been prosecuted together for looting. While the same officer had arrested them several minutes apart on the West 130th Street bridge, blocks away from the store on Lenox Avenue from which police charged they both had taken merchandise, there was nothing in their alleged offense to explain why their prosecution was not disposed of by plea bargaining. In fact, given that the circumstances of their arrest meant that the police officer could offer no evidence that they had broken into the store, a plea bargain seemed to be in the interests of the prosecutor. Moore, at least, likely refused to plead guilty to a lesser charge. A story in the Daily Worker reported he was represented by an International Labor Defense lawyer, who it credited with having "riddled the framed-up case against the worker" to such an extent that the judge directed his acquittal. The case against Ford was not disposed of in the same way: he pled guilty to a lesser charge, the same plea bargain that disposed of the cases of the other ten men indicted for burglary prior to trial. Given that the offer appeared to come after the acquittal of Moore, the district attorney must for some reason not have offered it to Ford before the trial.
The decision to put the other three men on trial rather than disposing of their cases through plea bargaining is easier to explain. All three Black men had been charged with assaulting white men, in one case a police detective. White authorities would have responded harshly to such interracial violence at any time in 1935; the context of the disorder would only have heightened that reaction. The prejudice that the Black defendants faced makes the outcomes of their trials striking . A week after the trial of Moore and Ford, Isaac Daniels and James Hughes faced juries, who acquitted Daniels and found Hughes guilty of a lesser charge, misdemeanor assault. The final trial occurred almost two months later, on May 29, when a jury acquitted Paul Boyett of assaulting a white man, Timothy Murphy. Prosecutors failed to convince juries that Daniels and Boyett were among those who assaulted white men. Police did arrest Boyett at the scene of the assault on Murphy, but evidently could not refute his testimony that he had been a spectator not a participant. Daniels was arrested hours after Herman Young was assaulted, when the white storeowner identified him among those being treated at Harlem Hospital. Daniels and his wife insisted he was home at the time of the assault. Later he went out for a packet of cigarettes, which is apparently when he was injured. The jury found that testimony more compelling than Young's identification. While the police witnesses against Hughes did convince the judge and jury that he had thrown the rock which struck Detective Roge, they failed to establish that the officer had been his target. Instead, the judge believed that Hughes had intended to hit the windows of the store behind Roge. Taken together, those outcomes suggest a desire to punish someone for the assaults on white men and women during the disorder led district attorneys to pursue prosecutions even when the evidence was weak.
Convictions of men charged with felonies did not result in sentences significantly different than those imposed on those charged with misdemeanors, largely because eleven of those men had been convicted of misdemeanors. Apart from the three men whose sentences judges suspended, all those sentenced in the Court of General Sessions received terms of at least three months in the workhouse. Those terms were at the upper range of those imposed in the lower courts. At the same time, only two men, Edward Larry and Arnold Ford, were sentenced to more than six months imprisonment: Ford received an indeterminate sentence on account of his youth and Larry, received the longest term, fifteen to thirty months, consistent with him being the only person convicted of a felony. A judge sentenced the one man convicted by a jury, James Hughes, to only three months in the workhouse.