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Appearances in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20
1 media/Washington Heights court_March 20 outcomes_thumb.png 2022-12-05T14:36:39+00:00 Anonymous 1 2 Made with Wee People: https://github.com/propublica/weepeople plain 2022-12-08T19:13:13+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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2022-12-06T03:27:53+00:00
In the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20
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2023-08-01T15:43:49+00:00
Thirty blocks to the north, the hearings before Magistrate Ford had very different outcomes from those in the Harlem court. While the police presence at the Washington Heights courthouse was similar to that at the Harlem courthouse, spectators appear to have been fewer in number. Forty uniformed patrolmen were stationed on all the street corners surrounding the building, along the corridors inside and in the courtroom itself. If the sensational New York Evening Journal is to be believed, there were thirty more officers "hidden in a nearby garage," three emergency trucks on hand, and some police on the courthouse roof. None of the journalists who reported from the court mentioned crowds inside the courtroom or on the surrounding streets. That may in part have been because police brought only twenty-nine men and one woman to the Washington Heights court for arraignment, less than half the number who appeared in the Harlem court. The white men arrested during the disorder were all arraigned in the Harlem court; only Black men and women appeared in the Washington Heights court.
Julius Hightower, an eighteen-year-old Black man that police alleged had broken windows was first of those arrested to appear before Magistrate Ford. He was one of the youngest of those arrested; two other eighteen-year-olds appeared after him, James Smith and Elva Jacobs, the only woman to appear in the Washington Heights courtroom. Well over half of the arrested men, eighteen of the thirty, were aged between twenty and twenty-nine years, a similar proportion as appeared in the Harlem. Fifty-year-old Joseph Payne was the oldest of those arrested, one of nine men over thirty years of age, the others evenly split between those aged in their thirties and those in aged their forties.
Hightower faced the same allegations as the first defendant in the Harlem court, breaking windows, as did the man who followed Hightower, forty-two-year-old Robert Porter. The assistant district attorney initially charged him with the offense of malicious mischief, which punished damage to property, but foreshadowing how the prosecution of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court would differ from what happened in the Harlem court, the charge was changed to disorderly conduct. That was also the offense with which Porter was charged. The decision to charge the men with disorderly conduct likely indicated either that they caused minimal damage or a lack of evidence that they were responsible for that damage despite being nearby when windows were broken, part of crowds on the streets.
Whether Magistrate Ford heard other accounts of windows being broken in the rest of the day’s proceeding cannot be discerned from any of the surviving sources. None of the twelve men and one woman who appeared later in the day whose alleged offenses were recorded had been arrested for breaking windows. However, for fifteen other men charged with the offense of disorderly conduct – half of all those who appeared before Ford – there is no record of what police alleged they did. The offense itself was not a guide to the reason for their arrest. Over the course of the day, the prosecutor used the charge of disorderly conduct not only in cases of men arrested for breaking windows, but also for men arrested for assault and looting. In the Harlem court, ADA Carey took the same approach, with men arrested for assault, looting and inciting crowds, as well as breaking windows, charged with the offense of disorderly conduct. What was different in the uptown court was how extensively the charge was used, in two-thirds of the prosecutions compared to less than one in five, 15%, of the cases Carey prosecuted in the Harlem court.
Twenty-seven-year-old Richard Jackson followed Porter. Police had arrested him for assault. The next four men to appear before Ford after Jackson faced the same allegation. However, where in the Harlem court Carey charged only one of the men arrested for assault, Rivers Wright, with disorderly conduct, all six men in the Washington Heights court faced that charge. Those decisions could indicate that the alleged acts of Jackson and the other men did not result in significant injury or that police did not have evidence that they participated in an assault. That was most likely the situation of the final three men in that group, Albert Yerber, Ed Loper, and Ernest Johnson, arrested just before daylight on March 20 (together with Charles Alston, who was injured and would not appear in court for several weeks). Police officers had pursued and arrested the group after claiming to have heard shots fired from a building at patrolmen stationed on a street corner but found no guns in their possession. The short sentences of two days in the Workhouse that Ford gave to Jackson and the other man arrested for assault, Salathel Smith, suggests that they too had not been involved in violent assaults.
After the string of men arrested for assault, police brought Lamter Jackson before the Magistrate. The twenty-four-year-old man had been arrested for looting. That was the accusation that Ford likely heard most frequently over the course of the day, as was Renaud’s experience in the Harlem court. Jackson faced a charge of petit larceny, as Earl Davis did later in the day, indicating evidence they had taken merchandise but not that they had broken into a store to do so. As in the Harlem court, an arrest for looting more often resulted in being charged with burglary, which involved breaking into a business in addition to taking merchandise: four men, including the fifty-year-old Joseph Payne, and Elva Jacobs faced that charge. the prosecutor charged one man arrested for looting, James Smith, with disorderly conduct. If anyone arrested for inciting crowds or possession of a weapon appeared before Ford, they were among those charged with disorderly conduct for who there is no record of their alleged offense.
Magistrate Ford departed from Magistrate Renaud in remanding only one in six of those who appeared before him, four men and Elva Jacobs, a third as many as Renaud did in the Harlem court. All five had been arrested for looting. He also sent only two for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, Earl Davis and Lamter Jackson, the men arrested for looting who faced charges of petit larceny, and referred no one to the grand jury. None of the men arrested for assault was remanded or sent for trial, nor were any of those arrested for breaking windows or unknown offenses. In all twenty-three cases where men were charged with disorderly conduct Ford adjudicated the prosecutions. Renaud had held a quarter of those facing that charge in his court for investigation, which contributed to him adjudicating only nine cases. However, it was the significantly higher proportion of defendants who faced charges of disorderly conduct that produced the disparity in outcomes: as reporters noted, the cases that appeared before Ford were not as serious as those on Renaud’s docket. Perhaps because of the lesser charges they faced, none of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court was represented by a lawyer, as fourteen men and two women were in the Harlem court.
Ford handed down guilty verdicts to nineteen of the men he put on trial, including both Hightower and Porter, arrested for breaking windows, James Smith, the one man arrested for looting charged with disorderly conduct, and all but Ernest Barnes of the fifteen arrested for unknown offenses. Yerber, Loper and Johnson, Ford acquitted. The testimony that Ford heard must have been quite different from the sensational stories about snipers targeting police that reports of the arrests generated in several white newspapers. Unlike the acquittals in the Harlem court, those in the Washington Heights court were mentioned in two newspaper stories but with no details. While the sentences that the convicted men received would prove to be typical of those given to those arrested during the disorder, that they had been convicted only of disorderly conduct created a picture of the events above 130th Street, where those who appeared in the Washington Heights court had been arrested, as less violent than in the blocks to the south where those who appeared in the Harlem court had been arrested.
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2022-12-03T17:44:02+00:00
In Washington Heights court on March 20 (30)
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Thirty of those arrested during the disorder appeared in the Washington Heights court on March 20. Magistrate Ford adjudicated over 80% of those prosecutions, twenty-five of the thirty. He rendered verdicts in most cases, convicting nineteen men and discharging four others. That was far more cases than Magistrate Renaud decided in the Harlem Court that day in large part because those arraigned in the Washington Heights Court faced less serious charges. That difference was also apparent in the small number of people Ford sent for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, just two men, and the lack of anyone charged with a felony referred to the grand jury. The remaining four men and one woman he remanded in custody on bail. Those hearings were reported in all Harlem’s white newspapers, but not in Black newspapers, which did not report the disorder until March 30, when they reported later court appearances. The newspaper stories varied in detail, with most only offering general accounts in less detail than they reported the hearings in the Harlem court.
Only the New York Evening Journal, New York Sun and New York Post provided specific descriptions of the scene at the court. All three noted the building was “heavily” guarded by police. The New York Sun added the details that “Policemen were stationed at all corners surrounding the building, in the corridors of the building and in the court. Forty were on duty.” Typically, the details published in the New York Evening Journal were more sensational as well as describing more police, "53 policemen, nightsticks in hand, patrolling the block," thirty more hidden in a nearby garage, three emergency wagons on hand and a few policemen stationed on the courthouse roof. The Home News, Daily News, New York Times, New York Post and New York American offered generalizations about the scene at both the Washington Heights and Harlem Courts which described the presence of police keeping crowds away from the building. Given that the stories in which those descriptions appeared focused on events at the Harlem court, they are entirely reliable as evidence of the scene at the Washington Heights court.
No newspaper stories gave details about the crowd size. The only mention of the crowd’s behavior was the general statement in the New York Times – “There was considerable grumbling, some shouting of threats, but no violence” – that fitted other evidence of the crowd at the Harlem court. There were also no photographs published of prisoners arriving at the court, as there were of those scenes at the Harlem court.
Only the Home News and New York Herald Tribune published lists of those being arraigned, neither of which was complete (the list of those arraigned published in the New York Evening Journal included appeared to include only those who appeared in the Harlem court, although the copy of this story examined for this study was incomplete). The list in the Home News was more complete than its list of those arraigned in the Harlem court, including twenty-five of those who appeared, omitting only one man remanded on bail and, as had the Harlem list, those the magistrate discharged. However, the list included details of alleged offenses for only five men and one woman, all those either remanded on bail or sent to the Court of Special Sessions included in the list. Only the name, age and address of the nineteen men convicted was provided. The list in the New York Herald Tribune likewise provided only those details, for fifteen of the nineteen convicted, adding the length of their sentences. That story provided details of the alleged offenses of two additional men convicted by Magistrate Ford, the first two men who appeared in court. It omitted two of those convicted (Salathel Smith and Walter Jones) made no mention of the cases on which the Home News focused attention, the men and women remanded or sent for trial, while following that publication in not mentioning the four men the magistrate discharged.
There were no cases in the Washington Heights court that attracted reporters as the arraignment of the five alleged Communists in the Harlem court did. The New York Post mentioned the details of one case in its summary account, a man “held in $1,000 bail for stealing a can of coffee from a windowless grocery store.” That man was likely Raymond Taylor, the only one of the three men who allegedly took goods from a grocery store arraigned in the court for who Magistrate Ford set bail at $1000 (although none of the other sources that mention Taylor specify that he took coffee). It is not clear why the reporter singled him out for mention.
The other detail that the New York Post reported was that “Up to noon, only four of the persons arraigned in both courts had been discharged. All four of these cases were at Washington Heights.” Those four men were the only prisoners Magistrate Ford discharged. That he discharged prisoners was also mentioned in the New York Sun. That story noted that “Of the first nine arraigned at this court, all charged with disorderly conduct, three were discharged; the others were found guilty and given the alternative of paying a fine of $25 or serving five days in jail.” The Washington Heights court docket book recorded the outcome of those prosecutions slightly differently: Ford discharged three men among the first nine arraigned, but convicted only five of the others. He sent the other man, Lamter Jackson, the eighth arraigned, for trial in the Court of Special Sessions These were the only stories to mention that any of those arraigned had been discharged.
Those stories gave a misleading picture of the hearings as a whole. The focus on the number of men discharged, and on the first men arraigned, in those stories suggests that the reporters left the court before all those arrested in the disorder had been arraigned. The Daily News reporter likely remained longer as the newspaper’s story identified that what distinguished the hearings in the Washington Heights court overall was that “Magistrate Michael A. Ford meted out punishment in a majority of cases brought before him.” Where Renaud convicted only 8% of those who appeared before him, Ford convicted almost two thirds, 63%. That difference was the result of those arraigned in the Washington Heights court facing less serious charges. However, as those convictions were reported without details, just what those convicted had allegedly done is unknown. (Although the statement that “In most instances, the cases were set over for further hearings” in the New York American came directly after a reference to the Washington Heights court being heavily guarded, it likely referred to outcomes in the Harlem court). The only other reference to arraignments in the Washington Heights court was in the Daily Mirror, which noted that “40 of the 89 arrested during the night were dealt with later in the day,” and “16 pleaded guilty of sabotage charges and received sentences of varying degrees.” None of those details align with the legal records: only thirty of those arrested appeared in the court; one hundred and six of those arrested appeared in court on March 20; no one pled guilty.