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• 1 2020-03-31T15:45:54+00:00 Cases in the Court of Special Sessions (46) 51 plain 2024-02-09T20:41:31+00:00 Forty-four of those arrested in the disorder were tried for misdemeanor offenses in the Court of Special Sessions. Twenty-two of those individuals were sent to the court by magistrates; the remaining twenty-two came from the grand jury. Arthur Killen was sent from the Harlem court to face two charges, for malicious mischief and possession of a weapon. Leroy Brown also faced two charges, malicious mischief and, after being sent by the grand jury, riot. (Two others faced additional charges in other courts, with Hashi Mohammed convicted of disorderly conduct in the Washington Heights court and the charge of burglary against Raymond Easley dismissed by the grand jury.) Judges in the Court of Special Sessions found guilty a similar proportion of those who appeared before them as did magistrates in the lower court, twenty-six of thirty-two (81%), with the outcome of ten prosecutions unknown. The conviction rate in the Court of General Sessions was slightly lower (12 of 17, 70%).
  
  All of those charged with riot were tried in this court; none were sent to the Court of General Sessions to face trial on more serious felony charges. Judges in the Court of Special Sessions convicted six of those tried for riot, acquitting Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators (the outcome of two trials are unknown). Aside from that atypical case, the judges convicted all those tried for riot. However, they suspended the sentences of all six of those individuals they convicted, an outcome that suggested that they did not consider their actions merited significant punishment. The prosecution of the four Communists stands apart from the those cases: it resulted at least as much from District Attorney Dodge's desire to blame them for the disorder as from the men's actions, which did not fit the definition of riot. The trial did not take place until three months after the disorder and more than a month after the trials of all but one of the others arrested in the disorder had been completed. If the delay was to give prosecutors time to gather evidence, their efforts had ultimately failed. The only witness they called was a police sergeant, and after he testified that a crowd had gathered before the men arrived, rather than as a consequence of their actions, the judge granted the motion of the men's ILD lawyers to dismiss the case.
  
  Just over half of those charged with looting, eighteen men, including one white man, and one Black woman, were tried in the Court of Special Sessions. Judges convicted thirteen of the seventeen tried in that court where the outcome is known. Apart from Elva Jacobs, convicted of unlawful entry, all those convictions were for petit larceny. Overall, the sentences imposed on those arrested for looting in this court were consistent with the treatment of these cases as warranting punishment as a misdemeanor, with few of the terms of ten days or less often imposed in the Magistrates Courts, and more sentences of three months or longer, rarely seen in the lower court. Three of those convicted received indeterminate sentences of up to one year. In the case of John Henry, it was his youth that explained his sentence. As he was only sixteen years of age, the judges in the misdemeanor court sent him to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory on Randall's Island. The other two men were adults sent to the penitentiary. Louis Cobb had an extensive history of imprisonment that would have led to his sentence. So too likely did the other man, Nathan Snead, but unlike Cobb, whose record is in the sources because he had been sent to the court from the grand jury, Snead was referred directly from the Magistrates Court, so did not generate the same evidence. Elva Jacobs, one of the two Black women sentenced in the court, appears to have received a sentence consistent with those of Black men. Jacobs had her sentence suspended, as did three Black men, a third of those sentenced for looting in this court.
  
  The four men acquitted of looting included one about whom there are no details and one apprehended in a crowd around a store whom police likely could not link to its looting. The two remaining men, police arrested away from the businesses they allegedly looted. James Williams had been represented by a lawyer in the Magistrates Court, so may have had a better defense than most arrested during the disorder; the other, Jean Jacquelin, was a white man. While five white men in all were released, almost two-thirds of those arrested, that the three Communists are included in that group weighs against treating those outcomes as evidence that the courts showed leniency towards white defendants.
  
  Only one of those charged with assault was tried in the Court of Special Sessions; three other men faced trial in the Court of General Sessions. Harry Gordon was the only white man charged with assault, on a patrolman who pulled him down when he tried to speak to the crowd in front of the Kress store. He was the last of those arrested during the disorder to be tried, in November, eight months after the disorder and five months after the trial of the four Communists. Unlike in that case, the delay did allow prosecutors to gather sufficient evidence for the judges to convict Gordon. What sentence they imposed is unknown.
  
  All four men charged with possession of a weapon were tried in the Court of Special Sessions, none having the previous conviction that made the offense a felony. Only one had been arrested for that offense, Jose Perez; two had been arrested for breaking windows, and one for looting, and then found to have a weapon. The judges convicted Perez, the only one of the three charged with carrying a gun. There are no other details of the case, and no information on the sentence to explain the verdict. The judges acquitted Hashi Mohammed of carrying a knife, while Magistrate Ford convicted him when he was tried for disorderly conduct rather than the other offense for which he had been arrested, breaking windows. As Mohammed had been injured, likely during his arrest, those divergent outcomes might indicate that police brought the charge of carrying a weapon to justify their violence. The outcomes of the other two trials are unknown.

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