The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson

October 1, 2021

Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative reporter Joyner writes a history of the wrongful murder conviction of Black Georgia sharecropper Clarence Henderson. In 1948, Carl Stevens Jr., a white man, was murdered in Carrollton, GA; after what Joyner calls a sloppy investigation, Henderson was accused of the murder, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The Georgia Supreme Court granted Henderson a retrial, finding that he had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence; he was found guilty in the retrial, then granted a third trial to introduce additional ballistics evidence. Joyner provides background on life in Carrollton after World War II, when town politics became more progressive except in matters of race. He writes that prosecutors empaneled all-white juries and played on negative stereotypes of Black men to win their case against Henderson. Other factors in the case were new forensic investigation methods and the involvement of the U.S. Communist Party and the NAACP in Henderson's appeals. Joyner synthesizes all of these elements and offers a detailed play-by-play of the three trials to argue that despite Henderson's unjust treatment by prosecutors, he fared better than most Black defendants, in that his conviction in the third trial was eventually overturned and he was released. VERDICT A compelling account of "justice" in the Jim Crow South. Recommended for readers interested in true crime and race.--Rebekah Kati, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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Starred review from November 15, 2021
Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigative reporter Joyner debuts with a searing look at an unsolved murder case, which led to three trials, three convictions, and three death sentences for Black sharecropper Clarence Henderson. On Halloween night 1948, in Carrollton, Ga., a masked man with a gun ordered 22-year-old military veteran Buddy Stevens and his teenage girlfriend, Nan Turner, to get out of Stevens’s parked car. The man ordered Stevens to rape Turner, but he refused. Stevens subsequently lunged at the man, who shot him dead, and Turner escaped. When ballistics seemed to match a weapon that a man claimed Henderson had sold him two months after the murder, Henderson was arrested. That led to his long odyssey in the criminal justice system and the intervention of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, whose lawyers were led by Thurgood Marshall. Eventually, in 1953, Henderson’s attorneys’ efforts on multiple appeals led to his being freed, though in Georgia many continued to believe he “was a serial rapist of white women who had gotten away with murder.” Joyner provides just the right level of detail in this stranger-than-fiction narrative, in which endemic racism almost resulted in the execution of an innocent man. Admirers of Timothy Tyson’s The Blood of Emmett Till will be riveted. Agent: Matt Carlini, Javelin.