This page was created by Anonymous.
New York Penal Law, § 240-245: Assault
1 2021-09-20T02:49:53+00:00 Anonymous 1 6 plain 2023-11-06T07:54:55+00:00 Anonymous[Statute]
This page is referenced by:
-
1
2020-10-01T00:07:06+00:00
Harry Gordon arrested
115
plain
2024-01-25T19:59:45+00:00
Around 6:30 PM, Patrolman Irwin Young arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student, on the north sidewalk of West 125th Street near 7th Avenue. Gordon had climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd that police had pushed east, away from the Kress store; Young pulled him down. The patrolman alleged that Gordon then grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it; Gordon denied doing anything. He told a public hearing of the MCCH that Young and other officers dragged him thirty feet to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street. Louise Thompson had seen Gordon "get on the mailbox to speak and...dragged down by a policeman," after which "a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs." Although Thompson was affiliated with the Communist Party and thus not an entirely objective witness, her account of the police violence was not disputed.
As soon as the radio car reached 7th Avenue, out of sight of the crowd on 125th Street, Gordon told the MCCH hearing that the police officer driving said “Go ahead and hit him" to the officer next to him, and both men “poked him in the ribs and kicked him.” When the car got to the station, Young pushed him up against the wall of the station and clubbed him in the stomach. Police officers continued to beat and kick Gordon when he was put in a cell, taken upstairs for questioning, and fingerprinted. As a result of these attacks, Gordon testified, “I had two black eyes. Had bumps on my head. My shins were bruised.” When he was bailed and released forty-eight hours after being arrested, his lawyer described Gordon’s face as “entirely discolored,” so much so that he took Gordon to his home so his mother would not see his injuries, he told the public hearing. The man identified as Gordon has no visible injuries in photographs taken a few seconds apart published in the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal that purported to show him and the three other white men police arrested in front of Kress’ store on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, one of the men was only partly visible, behind the other three, and could be injured. The caption to the Daily News photo suggests otherwise, labeling all the men "unmarked by the race riots."
Gordon was among the group of around ninety-six of those arrested put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters downtown at Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20, before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Gordon was brought to the platform together with Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at other times protesting in front of Kress' store, a New York Herald Tribune story noted, with police presenting the group as acting and arrested together. However, Gordon's actions overshadowed the larger group in stories about the line-up. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder in an exchange reported in three newspapers. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported the details of the setting, but only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" Gordon declared "I am a student at City College of New York" and "refused to answer further questions." The reporter described Gordon's manner as "defiant." Other reporters conveyed a similar judgment in their portrayals of Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune described him as "a tall, lanky youth [who] thrust one hand in his pocket and struck an orator's attitude" during the questioning; the New York Sun described his pose as "Napoleonic." Neither of those stories mention Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quoted him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer. The Daily Mirror concluded that Gordon, in responding as he did, "had practically declared himself the inciter of the night's rioting" and the leader of the four other men arrested at the beginning of the disorder. Gordon himself, testifying at the MCCH hearing, set himself apart, as a passerby who had attempted to urge the crowd to go to the police for information. Inquiries by reporters from the New York Evening Journal found no evidence that Gordon was a City College Student, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting Dean Morton Gottschall did not find him in college records. The New York Evening Journal did confirm that he lived in the Bronx, at 699 Prospect Avenue.
Gordon did not appear in the MCCH transcription of the 28th Precinct blotter, nor did Miller and the two white Young Liberators arrested in front of Kress’ store. Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store before Miller's arrest and Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator arrested with two white companions soon after Miller, did appear in the transcription. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time.
Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators with whom police had grouped him. The charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault, which was the charge reported by New York American, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune. A second list in the New York Evening Journal, a later story in the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Amsterdam News, Daily Mirror, and New York Sun reported Gordon had been charged with both offenses. The Home News, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, New York Age, and the list published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, reported the charge against Gordon as inciting a riot.
The mistaken information about the charge could result from police continuing to group Gordon with the Miller and the three Young Liberators when he appeared in court. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used, in stories on the court appearances. However, while the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Mirror included all five men in that group, the New York American, Home News, and New York Times omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from Miller and the other three men. That separation was likely because he was charged with assault, the other men with riot, and the officer listed as arresting Gordon was Patrolman Irwin Young not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Miller and the three other men.
The Daily Mirror claimed Gordon was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers. While being held, Gordon testified, he had not been not allowed to contact a lawyer or his family and was not fed until he had been in custody for more than twenty-four hours and had been arraigned in the Magistrate's Court. In the courthouse on March 20, Gordon was able to make contact with an ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander. The attorney testified that while he was speaking with Frank Wells, who he had learned had been arrested, he saw Gordon, who he claimed not to know, and spoke with him after his arraignment. Gordon asked him to communicate with Edward Kuntz, another ILD lawyer, whose son Gordon testified was a friend. Kuntz would represent him in subsequent court appearances. After Gordon was taken away, Englander heard him scream, the result, Gordon claimed, of being beaten again by police officer. The attorney made no mention of the visible injuries on Gordon’s face that Gordon and Kuntz described in their testimony.
Magistrate Renaud remanded Gordon to reappear on the March 25, on a bond of $1,000; the magistrate also remanded the other four alleged Communists, but for them set the maximum bail of $2,500. Around forty-eight hours after Gordon’s arrest, at 1 AM, Kuntz told a public hearing that he secured bail for Gordon, who was released from prison.
Gordon returned to court on March 25, at the same time as Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators, but there his treatment further diverged from them. While Renaud discharged the other four men as the grand jury had already sent them for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, in response to evidence presented by District Attorney Dodge as part of his investigation of the disorder, the magistrate again remanded Gordon, to appear on March 27, with the New York American and Home News reporting that police were planning to submit evidence to the grand jury seeking to have him indicted. (The only other newspaper to report this appearance was the New York World-Telegram.) That effort was unsuccessful. When Gordon appeared again in the Magistrates Court, the ADA reduced the charge against him from felony assault to misdemeanor assault; in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book a clerk struck out Fel[ony] Ass[ault] and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." Kuntz claimed credit for the reduced charge when he questioned Gordon about this legal proceeding in a public hearing of the MCCH. While Gordon testified that the ADA had said he was doing Gordon a “favor” by withdrawing the assault charges, Kuntz drew out that his cross examination of Patrolman Young established that the officer did not go to a doctor or a hospital, so did not suffer injuries justifying a felony charge, or even simple assault. He also testified that a new charge of unlawful assembly, the misdemeanor form of riot, had been made against him at that hearing, information not mentioned in any other sources. Magistrate Renaud transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on the reduced charge, a decision reported only in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune.
For some reason, the trial did not take place for almost eight months. Sometime in early November the judges convicted Gordon and sentenced him on November 15. Arthur Garfield Hays, who had chaired the MCCH hearing at which Gordon testified, wrote to the Chief Judge of the Court of Special Sessions on November 13 after hearing of the conviction, the only evidence of that outcome. Expressing surprise about the conviction, Hays urged that Gordon be given a suspended sentence as he was "certainly not a criminal and was exercising what he deemed to be his right of free speech." Judge William Walling responded, telling Hays that he "did not have all the facts." As far as the judge was concerned, "There was not the slightest doubt but that Gordon assaulted the officer who was in uniform. Thereafter, of course, the officer hit back and subdued Gordon." That assessment made it unlikely Walling and his colleagues would have imposed the suspended sentence Hays favored. However, what sentence they imposed on Gordon is unknown. -
1
2020-09-30T19:34:09+00:00
James Hughes arrested
59
plain
2024-01-27T16:38:02+00:00
Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10:00 PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that the stones were to defend himself and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.
Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th Street and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue before returning home for supper and then heading out again at 9:30pm to go drinking, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.
The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.
When Hughes appeared for sentencing, the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from a minister named Haynes received by the mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later, Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”
Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.
Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.
Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense." -
1
2020-02-26T18:59:50+00:00
Isaac Daniels arrested
50
plain
2024-01-27T15:59:41+00:00
Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Herman Young, in his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. After hearing glass smashing, Young and his wife, Rose, had come downstairs from their apartment to the store, whose windows had been looted and encountered a man on the stoop, trying to come through the door. The man allegedly cursed at Young — "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here” — and then threw a stone that smashed the glass in the door. Both the stone and flying glass hit Young. Taken to Harlem Hospital, Young was being stitched by a doctor when Daniels entered to receive treatment. Young identified him as the man who had assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested Daniels. Another man, James Williams, was later arrested for looting the store. The affidavit in his case made no mention of Young being assaulted, instead recording that he had come downstairs to find four men in the store stealing merchandise.
The report of the arrest in the Home News linked Daniels and Young and included the detail that Young had been cut by flying glass. Daniels also appeared in lists of those who arrested and charged with assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, neither of which included the circumstances which led to his arrest. He also appeared in lists of the injured published in the Home News and New York Post, one of four men arrested for assault with injuries. In Daniels' case, the list identified him as having "contusions" on his left arm.
Questioned in a lineup at the Manhattan Police HQ, Daniels denied throwing the stone at Young, and said he had been in the area because he was on his way home. Daniels, a native of Georgia who had come to New York City in 1928, lived with his wife only a few blocks from Young's store at 73 W. 130th Street. Later, at his trial, Daniels added the detail that he had gone out to buy cigarettes. His wife said that he had gone to the movies, and was listening to the radio at home at 1:00 AM when Young was attacked.
Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where he was charged with felonious assault. The Home News and New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, joining James Hughes and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct police blotter as having been discharged, as did James Hughes). The indictment in the district attorney's case file has a charge of first degree assault, with intent to kill, struck out, leaving a charge of second degree assault, with intent to cause bodily harm. That change suggests that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened (Young's wife had mentioned that the man who assaulted him had used a piece of pipe, but later reports mention only him throwing a stone). Indicted for assault, Daniels was one of the handful of individuals tried for alleged offenses during the disorder. On April 9, the district attorney's case file recorded that a jury acquitted Daniels, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him. -
1
2020-10-01T19:30:34+00:00
Paul Boyett arrested
46
plain
2023-11-09T06:46:26+00:00
Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder, he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.
Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.
Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.
Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, according to the district attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.
The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fit with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette. -
1
2020-09-28T20:32:00+00:00
Douglas Cornelius arrested
37
plain
2024-01-23T20:27:16+00:00
Around 10:30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old Black man, for allegedly using a rock to hit Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter, in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. Patrolman Mackenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two other men arrested in the same area of West 125th Street around the same time: Claude Jones, also at 10:30 PM at Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street, immediately west of where Cornelius was arrested; and William Ford, ten minutes later, at Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, several buildings further west. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. There are no details of what MacKenzie said in regards to the assault on Wijstem, but in the other two incidents, which resulted in the arrests of Jones and Ford, he stated he had witnessed the men breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them. Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10:30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
Like the man he allegedly assaulted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News. (Wijstem was named as the unidentified man in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22).
After being one of the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius was charged with felonious assault. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in court docket book, in his case Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and prominent member of the Elks Lodge with an office at 211 West 135th Street (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and William Ford, also had Black lawyers representing them). Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1,000, according to the docket book. When he appeared again, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him, as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court, as they had been indicted. However, there was no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution. Wijstem's condition may have delayed the legal process. A brief story in New York Herald Tribune in June 1935 reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness.
This page references:
- 1 2021-09-19T23:29:30+00:00 Consolidated Laws of the State of New York, Vol. 4. Penal law to real property law (Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1909). 8 plain 2024-01-28T19:26:20+00:00 New York State Library: https://nysl.ptfs.com/data/Library1/93317.PDF