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Sentenced (77)
While less than half of all those convicted, thirty-five of seventy-seven, were sentenced to more than a month in prison, the proportions varied by alleged offense. Just over half of those arrested for breaking windows and for looting received such a sentence compared with only one of those arrested for riot and one of those arrested for assault. The short sentences for assault reflected the failure of police to present evidence that those they had arrested had been involved in assaults, rather than part of crowds at the scene or, in the cases of James Hughes, targeting property. By contrast, the suspended sentences and probation given to those charged with riot was a decision of the sentencing magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions. The riot statute treated those who incited attacks on property, the charge against those arrested in the disorder, as guilty of a misdemeanor, for which they could be sentenced to up to a year in prison. No explanation for the lenient treatment of those men appears in any of the sources. It could be that as they were part of small groups in the midst of the disorder the magistrates did not consider them responsible for either starting the violence or its broader scope. While magistrates most often sentenced those arrested for alleged looting to terms of imprisonment, only rarely were those terms more than half the punishment of one year prescribed for misdemeanors. That pattern also applied to the sentences imposed by a judge in the Court of General Sessions. Putting aside Edward Larry, the only individual arrested during the disorder convicted of a felony, who had an extensive criminal record that determined his sentence to the State Prison, only one of the other eleven men sentenced in that court for alleged looting received a term longer than six months, and that was an indeterminate sentence to the House of Refuge for seventeen-year-old Robert Tanner on the basis of his youth.
That the sentences handed down in different courts did not differ significantly offered further evidence of how the legal process diminished the violence of the disorder. The misdemeanor offenses for which sentences were imposed in the Court of Special Sessions and Court of General Sessions carried a maximum term of imprisonment twice that of the offense of disorderly conduct for which those sentenced in the Magistrates courts had been convicted. The terms judges imposed did not reflect that difference [did they in the sense that sentences were longer in SS & GS even if not near max??]