Sixteen-year-old Alexander McClay Williams remains the youngest person Pennsylvania has put to death.
Sam Lemon, right, speaks during a news conference with Susie Williams Carter, center, and lawyer Michael Pomerantz, Monday, May 20, 2024, in Philadelphia. Carter is the sister of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania, Alexander McClay Williams, 16, and Lemon is the great-grandson of the attorney who represented him. Carter is suing the county where the Black teenager was convicted in 1931.
The 5-foot-5, 125-pound Williams instead quickly became a suspect, even though his hands were smaller, there were no eyewitnesses and no evidence linked him to the crime. He was held for days of interrogation without his parents or a lawyer on hand, and ultimately signed three confessions, researchers found.“They murdered him,” Susie Williams Carter, 94, of Chester, the last surviving sibling in the family of 13 children, said at a press conference Monday.
“There was nothing to connect him to the murder. He was a convenient Black boy at the hands of these detectives and this prosecutor,” Marrone said. Author and educator Samuel Lemon had known about the case since he was a child because Williams was defended at trial by his great-grandfather, William H. Ridley. The only Black lawyer in Delaware County at the time, Ridley had been paid $10 for the trial, with no support for investigators or experts. He faced off against a team of 15.
Carter said the truth about her brother might never have been known if not for the work by Lemon and others. “It cut deep because, if you think about it, it’s still going on to this day. You get pulled over by police, you’re scared to death, even me as a woman,” Perdue said. “I still go back to my uncle, thinking how he felt ... This keeps happening. It doesn’t stop.”
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