The black teenager Alexander McClay Williams was sentenced to death for the, in the words of the prosecutors, “brutal murder” and he became the youngest person to be sentenced to death in the state of Pennsylvania.
The following year, 1931, the sentence was carried out, but now the prosecutor’s office in Delaware County in western Philadelphia has admitted that he was most likely innocent, overturned the sentence and in a statement announced that the indictment would never have reached a court.
“I’m just so happy that in the end it turned out the way it should have been all along,” his sister, now 92-year-old Susie Williams-Carter, told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
She has been fighting for decades for her brother’s sentence to be overturned.
– We just wanted the sentence to be overturned, we knew he was innocent, she says now.
Alexander McClay Williams was questioned five times without a lawyer or guardian present, and had time to sign three confessions.
But there was no evidence that he was behind the murder. Despite that, and that there was instead evidence pointing to the murdered ex-husband, an all-white jury convicted the teenager after only four hours of deliberation.
“We believe the young man’s fundamental rights were irreparably violated,” Attorney General Jack Stollsteimer said in a statement now.