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• 1 2023-04-04T14:33:09+00:00 Completing the legal process (March 28-November) 43 plain 2432 2023-06-22T15:51:18+00:00 A week after those arrested during the disorder began to appear in the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates court, the prosecutions of approximately sixty-four of those men and women had been completed. It would take almost eight months for judges and juries to come to decisions regarding the fate of the remaining forty-nine men and two women. Those proceedings went largely unreported. After the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, New York American and New York Amsterdam News published stories about cases in the Harlem court and Court of General Sessions on March 28, only four other trials were mentioned in the press. The Daily Worker published stories on the trials of Communist Party members or at least those represented by ILD lawyers: the only story about Joseph Moore and one of only two stories about the trial of Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators in the Court of Special Sessions. The involvement of ILD lawyers and the verdict in their favor made those trials an obvious vehicle for promoting the Communist Party. It is less clear why the other story about the later trial was published, in the Black newspaper the New York Amsterdam News, which also published the one story about the trial of Paul Boyett. Boyett was acquitted of assaulting a white man, suggesting that the Black newspaper was concerned to give attention to outcomes that discredited the idea that the disorder had been a race riot. The story mentioned only Boyett's defense, so literally kept the alleged assault out of the story. The New York Amsterdam News may have also published the story about the trial involving the Communists because the same publications and individuals who had sought to blame them had also cast the disorder as a race riot. The New York Times rather than either of those publications reported the one other case that attracted attention, the trial of James Hughes. Unaffiliated with the Communist Party and found guilty of throwing a rock that hit a police officer, that case did not align with the apparent agendas of those publications. Why the New York Times reported the trial is not clear; it was the only legal proceeding related to the disorder that the newspaper reported after March 28.
  
  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 twenty cases involving individuals arrested during the riot 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 involving an arrest during the disorder presented to the grand jury was the one case presented after March 27 for which the grand jury voted an indictment. On April 23 it charged Paul Boyett with assaulting a white man. The grand also twice heard evidence about the killing of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs by Patrolman John McInerney, first on April 10, and then again on June 10, after the MCCH found additional witnesses. On both occasions the all-white grand jury dismissed the case, finding the white officer justified in killing of the Black boy.
  
  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 trials received almost no attention from the press even as the panel of three magistrates who presided convicted three out of every four of those who appeared. Eight of the 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, for assaulting a police officer. 
  
  Convictions were almost as often the outcome for those those sent to the Court of General Sessions as for those sent to the Court of Special Sessions, but the process was different. All but one of those convicted accepted the plea bargains that prosecutors offered as a standard practice at this time, eight after March 27 following Carl Jones, Hezekiah Wright, Joseph Wade and Thomas Jackson earlier. They pled guilty to a lesser offense, which for all but one of those arrested was a misdemeanor, which effectively erased the distinction between being convicted in the Court of General Sessions and in the Court of Special Sessions. Two other men were released without trial, Milton Ackerman and Raymond Easley. All five of the men put on trial in this court appeared more than a week after the disorder, reflecting the multiple steps involved in prosecuting a felony. Only three had their guilt decided by a jury. The judge directed the acquittal of Joseph Moore, while Arnold Ford pled guilty during his trial. Just one man was convicted by a jury, James Hughes, but he too was found guilty of only a misdemeanor. Despite being charged with assaulting white men, both Isaac Daniels and Paul Boyett were acquitted. Boyett was the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Court of General Sessions, on May 29. That left Edward Larry as the only individual convicted of a felony, having pled guilty to attempted grand larceny rather than face trial on a charge of robbery. While he was only person charged with that offense, his previous felony conviction had more to do with the outcome of this prosecution than what he allegedly had done in the disorder.