Jewish Organizations Shocked over Refusal of Georgia Pardons and Parole Board to Exonerate Leo Frank

Major American Jewish organizations expressed shock and outrage over the decision by the George State Board of Pardons and Paroles to deny posthumous pardon to Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was convicted of the murder of a 13-year-old girl in Atlanta in 1913 and who was lynched two years later by a mob in one of the nation’s worst outbursts of anti-Semitism.

The State Board chairman, Mobley Howell, said last Thursday, after the decision was announced, that Jewish organizations that had sought the exoneration of Frank failed to show beyond doubt that he was innocent. In a written statement, Howell said:

"After an exhaustive review and many hours of deliberation, it is impossible to decide conclusively the guilt or innocence of Leo Frank. There are many inconsistencies in the accounts of what happened."

The Board of Pardons reviewed the case after Alonzo Mann, now 85 years old, who was a 14-year-old office boy at the time Mary Phagan, an employe of the National Pencil Company was killed, told reporters last year that he had seen the factory’s janitor, Jim Conley, carrying the limp, unconscious body of the young girl to the factory basement. The parole board claimed that Mann’s statement did not provide any new evidence. Jewish organizations had also presented hundreds of pages of documentation to prove that Frank was innocent.

‘A SECOND MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE’

Theodore Ellenoff, chairman of the American Jewish Committee’s Board of Governors, said the parole board’s decision "is a second miscarriage of justice in this tragic case. If there is any serious doubt about Frank’s guilt — and the statement last year of surviving witness Alonzo Mann at the very least creates a serious doubt — Frank should have been exonerated." The AJCommittee, Ellenoff said, is now calling on the Georgia Legislature to rectify this injustice.

Jacqueline Levine, chairperson of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, said the board’s decision "is more than a commentary on this specific case. By its action, the Pardons and Paroles Board did not remove the lingering dark cloud that has continued to cast its shadow, for the past 70 years, over an open and pluralistic American society."

Nathan Perlmutter, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, declared: "If a corpse 70 years moldering can cry, Leo Frank’s is weeping today. Not for himself — death is immutable — but for justice, freshly lynched, and not by Klansmen but by bureaucratic insensitivity."

Dale Schwartz, the leading attorney for those seeking the pardon, said: "I can’t understand why, when every historian who has studied the case, and the main players including the trial judge and the governor who commuted his (Frank’s) sentence felt he was innocent, how the pardons and paroles board can call this inconclusive."

In a sworn affidavit, Mann told two investigative reporters for the newspaper, Nashville Tennessean, that he had been too frightened in 1913 to testify that he had seen Conely hold the limp body of Phagan. Mann said that Conley, who was convicted of being an accessory to the crime and given a year in prison, had warned him that he would kill him if he ever mentioned what he had seen. Mann told a news conference last Thursday,"I know deep down in my heart and what I saw, that Frank did not do this. " Frank was convicted of murder on the testimony of Conley, who was the chief prosecution witness. He said he had disposed of Phagan’s body for Frank, taking it to the factory basement.

When then Governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence after conducting a separate investigation of the crime, a mob kidnapped Frank from prison, took him to a tree near the Phagan home and hanged him. Armed mobs roamed the streets, forcing Jewish business firms to close their doors. About 1,500 of the 3,000 Jews in Georgia fled, and others were targets of a boycott.

Charles Wittenstein, Southern counsel for the ADL, said of the parole and pardon board last Thursday: "The state of Georgia was badly compromised by the conviction and the lynching. They had a chance to do something about that and they failed, and the whole country will know they failed."