The Montgomery Advertiser
- CHIEF EYE-WITNESS IN HALL-MILLS CASE UNABLE TO TESTIFY
- PREDICTS RADICAL COMMITTEE SHAKE IN COMING SENATE
- CHECK RUNNERS AT FLAT TOP BRUTAL TO KNOX, CHARGE
The Montgomery Advertiser's front page for November 5, 1926 put two murder trials next to news about the Senate. An AP dispatch from Somerville, New Jersey, reported that the Hall-Mills trial could not hear its chief eyewitness that day. Judges ruled that Jane Gibson, the pig raiser who said she had seen the killings, was too ill to testify. Earlier that day, experts had tied a fingerprint on the Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall's calling card to defendant Willie Stevens. From Birmingham, the paper's own correspondent covered the murder trial of former warden Charles R. Davis. There, the state called a former convict to show that check runners had brutally treated James Knox inside the Flat Top mine on the day he died. A second AP story predicted shake-ups in Senate committees, because Tuesday's elections had unseated Republican Senators Wadsworth, Ernst, Stanfield and Harreld, who held committee chairmanships.
Translation
CHIEF EYE-WITNESS IN HALL-MILLS CASE UNABLE TO TESTIFY
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 4. - (AP) - Serious illness of Mrs. Jane Gibson, pig raiser, today prevented the state from introducing the testimony of its chief eye-witness in the Hall-Mills murder trial. At the end of a day in which experts testified that a calling card found at the feet of the Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall bore a finger print of Willie Stevens, one of the defendants, Supreme Court Justice Charles W. Parker and County Judge Frank Cleary decided that Mrs. Gibson was too ill to tell her story and to undergo the "very rigorous painstaking and trying cross examination," which the defense announced it must conduct, in justice to its clients.
PREDICTS RADICAL COMMITTEE SHAKE IN COMING SENATE
NEW YORK, Nov. 4. - (AP) - Shake-ups in several of the more important of the senate standing committees in the seventieth congress will be necessary as a result of Tuesday's elections. There will be no changes, however, in the chairmanships of any of the major house committees. New chairmen of the senate military, privileges and elections, public lands and Indian affairs committees must be selected because of the defeats of Senator Wadsworth, New York; Ernst, Kentucky, Stanfield, Oregon, and Harreld, Oklahoma.
CHECK RUNNERS AT FLAT TOP BRUTAL TO KNOX, CHARGE
BIRMINGHAM, ALA., Nov. 4. - Special to The Advertiser. - In an effort to establish that James Knox, convict, had been brutally treated by Tom Tucker and Cecil Houston, check runners, while in the Flat Top mine on the day of his death, the state Thursday afternoon placed Charlie Biggs, negro, of Brewton, and former convict at Flat Top, on the stand as the fifth witness against Charles R. Davis, former warden, who is being tried on a charge of murder before Judge John P. McCoy, in the criminal court.
Context
Why Jane Gibson's illness mattered to the Hall-Mills prosecution
The AP dispatch describes a setback on November 4, 1926, the second day of the Somerville trial. Judges Charles W. Parker and Frank Cleary ruled that Jane Gibson was too ill to testify or to face the cross-examination the defense had promised. Gibson was the prosecution's key witness. She was the pig farmer on whose property the bodies had been found, and she said she had heard gunshots and seen one of several figures fall to the ground. Her story was also the defense's best target, because what she told police, newspapers and the court did not always match. The ruling delayed her testimony but did not remove it. Later in the trial, dying of cancer, she was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher, attended by a doctor and two nurses. The jury believed Frances Hall's testimony over Gibson's, and all three defendants were acquitted on December 3, 1926.
How a 1922 double murder reached a Somerville courtroom in 1926
The Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall and Eleanor Mills, a singer in his church choir, were murdered on September 14, 1922, in Franklin Township, New Jersey. A grand jury convened that November but failed to issue an indictment. Four years later, William Randolph Hearst's New York Daily Mirror revived the case, and its calls for action pushed the governor of New Jersey to reopen it. Governor A. Harry Moore ordered a second investigation and a trial in 1926. This history explains why the dispatch presents the calling card found at Hall's feet as new courtroom evidence. In the prosecution's theory, Willie Stevens supplied the weapon and left his fingerprint on that card. The trial was held at the Somerset County Courthouse before Parker and Cleary. It drew newspaper coverage from across the country and is regarded as an early example of a media circus, which helps explain why a Montgomery paper put a New Jersey courtroom on its front page.
How Alabama put its convicts to work in coal mines
The Birmingham trial grew out of Alabama's long practice of working prisoners in coal mines. From 1875 to 1928 the state and counties profited from the convict-lease system, under which companies and individuals paid governments for prisoners' labor on farms, in lumberyards and in coal mines. In 1912 the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company announced that it would use only free workers in its mines. The state then took over the management of the prison mines and sold their coal itself. By 1926, therefore, the state had been running prison mining for more than a decade. The Advertiser's report fits that arrangement: the defendant is a former warden, not a mine owner, and the men accused of brutality are the check runners at the mine. The system was in its final years when this trial took place. Alabama became the last state in the nation to abolish convict leasing, some five years after Florida.
Why the James Knox case put convict mining on trial
The Knox case was the scandal that put Alabama's prison mines under scrutiny in the mid-1920s. The Encyclopedia of Alabama records that in 1924 the death of a prisoner who had been tortured by being lowered into a vat of boiling water prompted an investigation. A University of Alabama at Birmingham human rights blog names that prisoner as James Knox, a white convict. It says that after his death he was injected with poison to make it look like suicide or an accident. The Advertiser's report shows what came two years later: the state building its murder case against former warden Charles R. Davis by calling a former Black convict to describe the check runners' brutality inside the Flat Top mine. According to the blog, cases like Knox's, in which the victim was white, drew public attention to prisoner abuse and helped end much convict leasing. The encyclopedia dates the final end of prison mining and convict leasing in Alabama to 1928.
What the 1926 Senate elections did to Republican committee control
The AP forecast rested on a real shift in the Senate. In the 1926 elections the Republican majority was reduced by seven seats. Ten Republican senators sought re-election and lost either in the primary or in the general election. The four the dispatch names did not all lose the same way. Robert N. Stanfield of Oregon lost renomination, then ran as an independent and lost again, which is why the AP counts him among the defeated alongside Wadsworth, Ernst and Harreld. Senators elected that November began their terms on March 4, 1927, at the start of what the paper calls the seventieth congress, so the committee posts held by defeated members would have to be filled then. The margin was narrowed further when the Senate refused to seat Pennsylvania's winner, William S. Vare, because of corruption and fraud charges. The seat losses and defeats are established fact. The AP's statement that particular chairmanships would change is a forecast made two days after the vote.
Original
CHIEF EYE-WITNESS IN HALL-MILLS CASE UNABLE TO TESTIFY
SOMERVILLE, N. J., Nov. 4. - (AP) - Serious illness of Mrs. Jane Gibson, pig raiser, today prevented the state from introducing the testimony of its chief eye-witness in the Hall-Mills murder trial. At the end of a day in which experts testified that a calling card found at the feet of the Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall bore a finger print of Willie Stevens, one of the defendants, Supreme Court Justice Charles W. Parker and County Judge Frank Cleary decided that Mrs. Gibson was too ill to tell her story and to undergo the " very rigorous painstaking and trying cross examination, " which the defense announced it must conduct, in justice to its clients.
PREDICTS RADICAL COMMITTEE SHAKE IN COMING SENATE
NEW YORK, Nov. 4. - (AP) - Shake-ups in several of the more important of the senate standing committees in the seventieth congress will be necessary as a result of Tuesday's elections. There will be no changes, however, in the chairmanships of any of the major house committees. New chairmen of the senate military, privileges and elections, public lands and Indian affairs committees must be selected because of the defeats of Senator Wadsworth, New York; Ernst, Kentucky, Stanfield. Oregon, and Harreld, Oklahoma.
CHECK RUNNERS AT FLAT TOP BRUTAL TO KNOX, CHARGE
BIRMINGHAM, ALA., Nov. 4. - Special to The Advertiser. - In an effort to establish that James Knox, convict, had been brutally treated by Tom Tucker and Cecil Houston, check runners, while in the Flat Top mine on the day of his death, the state Thursday afternoon placed Charlie Biggs, negro, of Brewton, and former convict at Flat Top, on the stand as the fifth witness against Charles R. Davis, former warden, who is being tried on a charge of murder before Judge John P. McCoy, in the criminal court.
Source: Holding institution