UCLA National Black Law Journal Title Witness to a Persecution: The Death Penalty and the Dawson Five Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3vx84116 Journal National Black Law Journal, 8(1) ISSN 0896-0194 Author Bedau, Hugo Adam Publication Date 1983 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California ARTICLES WITNESS TO A PERSECUTION: THE DEATH PENALTY AND THE DAWSON FIVE* Hugo Adam Bedau** The discretionary power . in determining whether a prosecution shall be commenced or maintained may well depend upon matters of policy wholly apart from any question of probable cause. A Fortiori, the deci- sion as to what charge to bring is likewise discretionary.2 I When the definitive history of capital punishment in the United States is written, the full story about capital trials, death sentences, and executions in the State of Georgia deserves to play a prominent role. Preliminary tal- lies of all executions in this country since the seventeenth century place Georgia near the head of the list.3 Since 1930, Georgia has legally put to death 366 persons;4 no other jurisdiction has executed so many in this pe- riod.5 Nowhere else in this nation have so many blacks been executed- 298 6-nor in any other state have blacks been so large a percentage of the total.7 Twenty years ago, Georgia led all other jurisdictions in the nation in the variety of statutory offenses for which the death penalty could be im- posed.8 Among classic miscarriages of justice, Georgia also has made its contribution with the death in 1915 of Leo Frank, lynched near Marietta * The prosecution subsequently dropped all charges against the five defendants; therefore, there is no published report of the case. ** Austin Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University. Ph.D. (Philosophy), 1961, Harvard University. I. United States v. Cox, 342 F.2d 167, 171 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 381 U.S. 935 (1965). 2. C. BLACK, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: THE INEVITABILITY OF CAPRICE AND MISTAKE 38 (1974), commenting on United States v. Cox, id. 3. Georgia has executed 851 persons, ranking third in the nation behind New York (1081) and Pennsylvania (1052). Memorandum of W. Espy, August 23, 1982, p. 1. 4. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, CAPITAL PUNISHMENT 1980, NATIONAL PRISONER STATISTICS, No. NCJ-78600 (1981). 16 (Table 3). 5. Id Georgia is followed by New York (329), Texas (297), and California (292). 6. Id Georgia is followed by North Carolina (199), Texas (182), and South Carolina (127) in terms of the number of blacks executed. 7. Id. Only the District of Columbia, with 40 total executions of which 37 were blacks (92.5%), exceeds Georgia (81.4%). Several other states-Maryland (80.8%), Virginia (80.6%), and Mississippi (80.5%)--closely approach Georgia in the high percentage of blacks executed. 8. According to the inventory of capital statutes published by the library of Congress in 1962, Georgia's capital statutes included twelve non-homicidal offenses and seven kinds of homicide. 108 CONG. REC. 3301 (Senate, March 1, 1962). According to the same source (at 3300), Alabama was in second place with eight non-homicidal and four homicidal capital offenses. An earlier in- ventory placed Alabama first with thirteen capital offenses, followed by Georgia with nine. Savitz, 8 BLACK LAW JOURNAL after a commutation of his death sentence for a murder it is now generally conceded he did not commit.9 Perhaps it is hardly surprising, therefore, that another Georgia death penalty case during 1977, involving the so-called "Dawson Five," threatened to add one more chapter to the annals of injus- tice. This essay, largely in the form of a personal reminiscence, narrates one of the central series of events in that complex and disturbing case. The case of the Dawson Five had all the ingredients of a classic south- ern death penalty scandal: the robbery-murder of a white victim in a remote rural setting; only one eye-witness, another white; the prompt arrest of an illiterate black teen-ager by an all-white police force; a confession implicat- ing four other black youths; no circumstantial evidence against the accused; denial of bail; a charge of coerced confessions; and looming over it all, the threat of the death penalty and execution in Georgia's electric chair. The case burst on the national scene within days of the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter in January of 1977." The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) undertook to supply legal counsel for the defendants, and in order to raise funds, sent a letter over the signature of Julian Bond (then President of SPLC) in a nationwide appeal. A copy of this letter arrived in my mail on January 23, 1977."' Since Dawson, where the crime occurred, is only twenty miles south of Plains, Jimmy Carter's hometown, the national media quickly seized on the case to point up the paradoxes of the "new South." Here was the first President from the Deep South since before the Civil War, a peanut farmer himself, perhaps, but supported by southern black leadership from the Civil Rights movement and eager to show the nation that Georgia was ready to share the national consensus on racial equality. Here was also a President who was going to make the govern- ment's protection of human rights, abroad and presumably at home as well, something more than a rhetorical flag flapping in the political breeze. Yet in Dawson, on his very doorstep, a wretched story was unfolding that harkened back to the very worst days of Georgia's ugly past, a land bloody with five hundred blacks lynched since Reconstruction. 2 To make matters even worse, the death penalty statute under which the Dawson Five were to be tried had been signed into law on March 28, 1973 by none other than then Governor Jimmy Carter.13 CapitalCrimes as Defned in American Statutory Law, 46 J. CRIM. L., CRIMINOLOGY & POLICE SCI. 355, 361 (Table II) (1955). 9. L. DINNERSTEIN, THE LEO FRANK CASE (1966). In 1982, 69 years after the event, a wit- ness to the murder for which Frank was lynched reported in a sworn statement that, as a boy of 14, he had observed another man (who became the chief witness at trial against Frank) carrying "the wilted body" of the victim, and that he had been threatened with death by this man if he ever told what he had seen. N.Y. Times, Mar. 8, 1982, at A12, cols. 1-6. 10. President Carter was inaugurated on January 21, 1977. 11. The letter itself is undated. On the same day, the case also apparently received its earliest national publicity; see Chicago Tribune, Jan. 23, 1977, at 8, col. 1. 12. The exact number is unknown. According to one source, 491 blacks were lynched in Georgia between 1882 and 1951; Guzman, Lynching, in RACIAL VIOLENCE IN THE UNITED STATES 57 (ed. A. D. Grimshaw, 1969). Another source gives the total as 510 between 1882 and 1927; W.F. WHITE, ROPE AND FAGGOTr 255 (1969). 13. N.Y. Times, Aug. 2, 1977, at 12, col. 3. For discussion, see Comment, Furman v. Georgia and Georgia's Statutory Response, 24 MERCER L. REV. 891, 930 (1973). BLACK LAW JOURNAL 9 4 The case began exactly a year before Carter's inauguration. 1 On Janu- ary 22, 1976, in mid-morning, a male customer in a small roadside general store on the outskirts of Dawson was shot and killed (so the store owner later testified) during an armed robbery. The next day (or two days later; reports differ) the store owner told Dawson police that he recognized one of the youths that allegedly committed the hold-up murder. He was Roosevelt Watson, 18, who lived at home nearby with his parents. Young Watson was promptly taken into custody by the sheriffs department and an agent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI). Under interrogation thirty miles away at police headquarters in Americus, Watson allegedly confessed to the shooting and implicated four others-his older brother, Henderson, 21, a cousin, J. D. Davenport, 18, and two friends, James ("Junior") Jackson, 17, and his brother, Johnny, 18. The death penalty entered the case right from the start. Once Roosevelt Watson was out on $100,000 bail, after serving nine months in jail, he told reporters that the police "told me they gonna put me in the electric chair ... They had these two things hooked up to my fingers. Had a thing on my arm, real tight. Said they gonna electrocute me if I didn't tell 'em."' 5 It was only later, apparently, that Watson learned he was merely undergoing the usual polygraph testing. But it was conceded to reporters by the GBI investigator that during Watson's interrogation "there was talk of electrocu- ' 6 tion." 1 According to a New York Times report, all five defendants were "indicted on charges of armed robbery and first degree murder, with the recommendation that they be given the death penalty if convicted."' 7 In its fund-raising appeals, SPLC stressed the threat of electrocution, and the me- dia understandably emphasized the grim prospect of execution as well. The talk about the death sentence from the accused and from the police was all the more alarming because of serious doubts about the guilt of the five defendants. Claims that they were innocent were heard virtually from the moment Roosevelt Watson was taken off the polygraph in Americus and returned to Dawson. At the preliminary hearing, he repudiated his confes- sion, claiming that it was coerced.