NEW YORK: An African-American teen executed in 1931 for the murder of a white woman was exonerated by a Pennsylvania court this week, after decades of lobbying by his only surviving sister.

Alexander McClay Williams, age 16, was convicted by a white jury in just four hours, and remains the youngest person ever put to death in the eastern US state.

But 91 years later, a county judge dismissed the case and declared Williams was innocent.

“I’m just happy that it finally turned out the way it should have in the beginning,” Williams’s sister, Susie Williams-Carter, was quoted by the Philadelphia Inquirer as saying on Thursday.

“We just wanted it overturned, because we knew he was innocent, and now we want everyone else to know it, too,” the 92-year-old said.

The case is the latest recognition of historic racial injustices in the US legal system, which convicted and in several cases executed innocent Americans, many of them black, in the century following the 1861-1865 civil war.

On Oct 3, 1930, the estranged ex-husband of Vida Robare, a white matron at Glen Mills School, a detention centre for young offenders, found Robare’s body.

She had been “brutally murdered” in her cottage, which was on the centre’s grounds, the district attorney’s statement said. The ex-husband, Fred Robare, also worked at Glen Mills School. Williams, who was serving an indefinite term there, was charged with the crime.

Interrogated five times without the presence of a lawyer or a parent, he signed three confessions “despite the lack of eyewitnesses or direct evidence implicating him”, the statement continued.

Published in Dawn,June 17th, 2022