Black Rage Confronts the Law

Paul Harris

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9780814773154
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droits civiques en droit

In 1971, Paul Harris pioneered the modern version of the black rage defense when he successfully defended a young black man charged with armed bank robbery. Dubbed one of the most novel criminal defenses in American history by Vanity Fair, the black rage defense is enormously controversial, frequently dismissed as irresponsible, nothing less than a harbinger of anarchy. Consider the firestorm of protest that resulted when the defense for Colin Ferguson, the gunman who murdered numerous passengers on a New York commuter train, claimed it was considering a black rage defense.

In this thought-provoking book, Harris traces the origins of the black rage defense back through American history, recreating numerous dramatic trials along the way. For example, he recounts in vivid detail how Clarence Darrow, defense attorney in the famous Scopes Monkey trial, first introduced the notion of an environmental hardship defense in 1925 while defending a black family who shot into a drunken white mob that had encircled their home.

Emphasizing that the black rage defense must be enlisted responsibly and selectively, Harris skillfully distinguishes between applying an environmental defense and simply blaming society, in the abstract, for individual crimes. If Ferguson had invoked such a defense, in Harris's words, it would have sent a superficial, wrong-headed, blame-everything-on-racism message. Careful not to succumb to easy generalizations, Harris also addresses the possibilities of a white rage defense and the more recent phenomenon of cultural defenses. He illustrates how a person's environment can, and does, affect his or her life and actions, how even the most rational person can become criminally deranged, when bludgeoned into hopelessness by exploitation, racism, and relentless poverty.

Chapter 1
The Black Rage Defense, 1846:
The Trial of William Freeman

The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied.
—The Talmud, Pirkei; Avot 5:11

The first recorded black rage defense took place in 1846. The parties involved included the son of an ex-slave and the wealthiest family in Cayuga County, New York. The prosecutor was the son of a U.S. president, and the defense lawyer was a former governor of New York. The trial was described as “one of the most interesting and extraordinary criminal trials that ever occurred in our country.”¹ It is a story of oppression and blood. It is a story of race and America.

William Freeman was born in a little settlement called New Guinea, a half mile from the town of Auburn, New York, in the year 1824. His father, James, a former slave, had been able to purchase his freedom in 1815. His mother, Sally, was part Native American, part African American, and was said to have some French blood. Therefore, William, or Bill as he was called, was considered a “quadroon of Tartar and African descent with a visage strongly marked with the distinctive features of the North American Indian.”

Sally’s tribe was virtually wiped out in the area near Berkshire, Massachusetts. She was a house servant and was sent to work in Auburn in 1817. There she and James were married, and William was born. Just three years after Bill was born, his father fell off the dock where he was working in Albany and died from the injuries. As was the custom with black children, Bill was sent to work as a servant boy for a white family when he was only seven years old. When he was nine he was transferred to the family of Ethan Warden, but he was fired because “of an uncontrollable disposition for play with other colored boys, which rendered his services valueless.”

Bill was then sent to work in the home of a judge. But he often left the estate to play in the countryside. He was so good at figuring out how to get away that this skill was blamed on his Indian heritage.

In the winter he worked doing household chores for a family named Lynch. When he was truant in his duties, Mrs. Lynch would whip him. Finally, unable to bear these whippings, the little boy escaped from the house and in his night clothes, in the freezing New York winter, fled home to his mother.

As Bill grew up he worked many places in and around Auburn, sometimes in private homes, sometimes as a waiter in local hotels. He was an intelligent, friendly, honest teenager who occasionally drank, as did his mother. When he was sixteen, however, an event took place that changed his life forever.

A woman named Martha Godfrey, in a town five miles from Auburn, had one of her horses stolen. Bill, who had been in the area, was arrested. After an examination by the magistrate, however, he was released. Weeks later the horse was found in a nearby county. It had been sold by a black man named Jack Furman. Furman knew that Bill had been a suspect and blamed the theft on him. Bill was again arrested. After a month in jail, frightened and desperate, he managed to break the lock of his cell, and he and another prisoner escaped. His cellmate was captured almost immediately, but Bill reached the woods and for two weeks was able to avoid the search parties. Finally, he was caught in a nearby town and returned to jail. Two months later he went on trial for larceny and breaking jail.

There were only three witnesses for the prosecution. Mrs. Godfrey testified to the loss and recovery of her horse. Mr. Doty, a neighbor, testified that he saw a Negro on the horse the night it was stolen. Jack Furman said that he went to the stable with Bill and saw him steal it. Bill testified that he was innocent and that he had only broken out of jail because he had heard Furman was going to lie about him in order to avoid prosecution.

The jury convicted Bill, and he was sentenced to five years at one of two large penitentiaries in New York, the State Prison at Auburn. Charges against Furman were dismissed. Evidence was later discovered that placed Bill at a different location on the night the horse was stolen. Furman, in the meantime, was arrested for another horse theft and was tried and sentenced to prison. But it was too late for Bill; he had been shipped off to what would become a nightmare of tragic proportions.

When sixteen-year-old Bill arrived at the prison he began to weep. Every person has a little place in his or her soul where hope is kept alive. Even though Bill had lived under an unjust system, some small part of him believed in justice. He was aware that new evidence had been found proving he was nowhere near the stable of the stolen horse, so Bill waited to be set free, but no relief came. The eyes of justice were indeed, in the words of the poet Langston Hughes, “two festering sores.”² How long can a man—or a sixteen-year-old boy—be in a prison cell wondering why he has been locked away for a crime he did not commit, without terrible changes taking place in his psyche?

Bill had been sentenced to hard labor. The prison had many shops where convicts worked under the supervision of private contractors. For two years Bill worked, mainly filing iron for plating. As time went on Bill became less intimidated and more angry. He resolved to struggle for the justice he felt he deserved. He told his bosses he should not have to work because he had done nothing to deserve being locked up in prison. The response he received was threats of punishment. So Bill worked less and less, which created hostility among his bosses, who viewed him as ignorant and incorrigible.

The keeper of the shop where Bill worked most of the time was a man named James Tyler. Tyler did not like Bill’s attitude and felt he was not doing enough work. He repeatedly threatened Bill with punishment. One day Tyler told Bill he didn’t want to hear any more excuses about being imprisoned. He said he was done trying to talk to him and was going to flog him. He ordered Bill to take off his clothes, and then turned around to get a cat-o’-nine-tails. Tyler later claimed that at this point Bill attacked him, and that during the fight Bill got hold of a knife. This was never confirmed by any other witnesses. But one thing was clear: Tyler hit Bill on the left side of his head with a large board that broke into pieces from the force of the blow. Tyler denied that the blow could have hurt Bill. Years later, however, a medical examination confirmed that the force of the board on Bill’s left ear had broken the ear drum and permanently damaged his left temporal bone.

Bill was now deaf in his left ear. His spirit seemed broken. He worked carrying yarn to and from the dye shop. He became sullen, morose, and easily provoked. He had two fights with other convicts over minor disputes, and both times Bill was flogged. The second time, the whipping was so bad that he could put his fingers into the hole that had been cut between his ribs.

His mental condition deteriorated. Prison rules did not allow conversation between inmates, and prisoners were supposed to talk to their bosses and guards only when it was necessary in performing their duties. With such disciplinary rules, no one recognized Bill’s worsening condition. They stereotyped him as a stupid, childlike Negro with a bad attitude. His brother-in-law, John Depuy, came to the prison five times to visit Bill. He was shocked at Bill’s state. He came home to tell Bill’s mother that her son had become deranged. The mother was so pained by what had happened to her son that she was unable to bring herself to go to the prison and face Bill.

After five years of prison, the day of Bill’s release arrived. The prison chaplain offered him a Bible, but Bill couldn’t read. Then the clerk told him to sign a voucher to receive two dollars. Bill looked at the voucher and said, “I have been in prison five years unjustly, and ain’t going to settle so.” The prison officers and the chaplain laughed.

John Depuy took him from the cold, foreboding halls of Auburn State Prison. Bill hardly recognized his brother-in-law. As they traveled home, Bill said he had accidently broken a dinner knife while eating and the guards had threatened to give him five more years in prison. He was afraid and asked John if they could do that to him. Over and over he said he needed to find the people who had caused him to be imprisoned and to make them pay him for the injustice he had suffered.

For months he lived with John. The people who had known him, both black and white, were stunned by the changes in him. He rarely talked, and when he did he often made little sense. People had described him as “a lad of good understanding and of kind and gentle disposition.” Now he seemed stupid, angry, and prone to break out in loud laughter for no reason.

One day, Bill walked the five miles to Mrs. Godfrey’s house and told her that he was innocent of stealing her horse and that he wanted her to pay him a settlement. She felt sorry for him and gave him some cakes. He left quietly.

Bill then went to a lawyer and asked for a warrant for the man whose testimony had put him in prison, saying that he wanted to get damages. The lawyer’s clerk told him to go to the justice of the peace’s office. A few days later he went to see a lawyer named Lyman Paine, who was a justice of the peace. Bill said he wanted “a warrant for the man who put me to State Prison.” Paine told him that the only warrant he could make out would be for perjury, and that he would need detailed facts to issue such a warrant. But Bill could not understand and just kept repeating himself. Finally, Bill threw a quarter on the table and said, “Sir, I demand a warrant.” He soon left the office but returned in the afternoon and gave Paine the names of Mr. Doty and Mrs. Godfrey. Paine would not issue a warrant and sent him away again. Refused a warrant, but unwilling to give up, Bill went to another justice two days later. Again he was denied a warrant and was informed that there was no legal remedy for his problem.

During the same period of time, Bill went to the John Van Nest farm, on Owasco Lake, four miles from Auburn. The Van Nests were a very wealthy and well-respected family. They had no previous relationship with Bill and had never seen him before. He asked for a job, was politely refused, and left the farm.

After being refused a warrant and visiting the Van Nest farm, Bill became more and more agitated. He bought two knives and, while showing them to John Depuy, started to threaten him. After John calmed him down, Bill said that he had found the folks that had put him in prison—“they were Mr. Van Nest”—and that he was going to kill them.

On the night of March 12, 1846, twenty-two-year-old William Freeman left the settlement at New Guinea with his knives, drank a pint of liquor, and walked to the Van Nest farm. He walked back and forth outside the yard, until after a long wait he saw Mrs. Van Nest open the back door and step outside. He ran toward her and began stabbing her. Her husband, John Van Nest, heard her screams and opened the door. Bill jumped on him and quickly killed him. He then ran upstairs and into a room where George, their two-year-old son, was sleeping, stabbing the boy so hard the knife pierced the bed. One of the men in the house, Cornelius Van Arsdale, confronted Bill and was also stabbed, but he managed to hit Bill with a candlestick and knock him down the stairs. As Bill left the house he ran into Mrs. Wyckoff, the mother-in-law, who attacked him with a carving knife and severed the tendons in his wrist. In the struggle, he stabbed her in the stomach. She too would die, two days later. Bill ran to the stable, took an old horse, and fled.

After some miles the horse gave out and fell. Bill killed the horse and stole another from a nearby barn. By the next day he was forty miles away in another village. When he tried to sell the horse, people became suspicious and called the authorities. A Mr. Alonzo Taylor found Bill in Gregg’s Tavern and arrested him. He accused Bill of the murder. When Bill denied, Taylor said, “You black rascal, you do know about it,” and raised his cane to hit him. He was stopped from striking Bill, but he then allowed two men to take Bill into another room “to get something out of him.” The two men beat Bill. He was then taken back to the Van Nest farm, where he was identified by Van Arsdale. He was continually interrogated and gave many different responses, from denials to statements that he wanted to get paid for being in prison, to sentences that just made no sense. One sentence, however, did make sense. Bill said: “You know there is no law for me.”

As word of the murders spread, people from all over the countryside gathered at the Van Nest farm. When Bill was brought there to be identified the crowd screamed for his death. They called out that he should be put on a rack, or burned at the stake. Some people had brought ropes and called for a lynching. However, the officers “by a diversion artfully contrived” escaped from the mob and managed to get Bill safely into the county jail. The mood in Auburn and Cayuga County was ugly. People were outraged when anyone even raised the idea that Bill might have been insane. The funeral services acted as a platform for Reverend A. B. Win-field, who used the sad occasion to stir up hatred against the “assassin” and to lobby for the death penally. Winfield’s speech is one that could be given today by proponents of capital punishment, as it criticized lawyers, judges, and the appeals process.

Winfield warned against “adroit counsel” who would use confusion and sympathy to pervert the law. He raised the specter of judges infected with sympathy who would thereby charge the jury in favor of the criminal. And he warned that the appeals process might put off the trial so long that witnesses would die. He railed against “false sympathy,” which would lead the murderer to be acquitted. He concluded by appealing to the assembly “to maintain the laws of their country inviolate” and put the murderer to death.

Given the atmosphere of the day, and the fact that the jurors would be drawn from the same county in which Winfield spoke, the reverend’s tirade served to inflame people even more against Bill and a possible insanity defense. His sermon was published and thousands of copies were given away free throughout the state of New York. The public was characterized by one of Bill’s attorneys as having “a demon thirst for blood, and unchristian thirst for revenge.” The Albany Argus observed: “It was with the utmost difficulty that the people of Auburn could be prevented from executing summary justice upon the fiend in human shape.”³

Bill, meanwhile, sat in his stone cell, chained at all times, as people from the community came and peered through the bars of the cell and doctors, law officers, and even the district attorney were allowed to question him.

As William Freeman lay chained in his cell, William Seward, the former governor of New York and one of America’s most prestigious lawyers, was talking with friends and associates from Auburn. A few of them pleaded with him to take up Bill’s defense. What kind of man was William Henry Seward, and why would he defend such an unpopular case? Seward was born in the farm country of New York State in 1801. His parents were of English, Welsh, and Irish extraction, leaving Seward with an affinity for Irish independence from Great Britain. His father, a Jeffersonian Republican, was a doctor, merchant, land speculator, and county judge. His mother was a compassionate woman, well respected in the community. Over the years his father amassed a fortune, and Henry (as he was then called) and his four siblings grew up in comfortable surroundings. In accordance with his father’s wishes, Henry went to college and then took up the study of law. He studied in school for one year and apprenticed in a law office for another year. At the age of twenty-two Henry passed his bar examination. He went to Auburn and began to practice law in the same firm as Judge Elijah Miller, a fortuitous move both professionally and socially. He met the judge’s daughter, Frances, and two years later they were married. Frances was an intelligent, strong, empathetic woman with a liberal Quaker background.

In 1830, Seward was elected to the state senate on the freedom and social equality program of the Anti-Mason party. He developed a reputation as a man who could forge idealism with political pragmatism. In 1838 he was elected governor of New York on the Whig party platform. An effective and respected politician, Seward advocated for penal reform, education for women, and schools for immigrants. When his term ended he returned to private law practice in Auburn, and no one doubted that at the propitious time he would again hold public office.

When William Freeman was captured and taken to jail, Frances Seward stood looking out the window of her house and watched the mob parading along South Street yelling for Bill’s death. She was quite shaken by the hate and thirst for vengeance she witnessed. She was also shaken by the murders. She had known the Van Nest family, and indeed, her husband had done legal work for them. She wrote to Henry in Albany, describing what she had seen and expressing concern for the prisoner.

Seward had developed an interest in the insane. His expertise was so great that social reformer Dorothea Dix visited him in Auburn in 1843 to get advice on how to improve conditions for the mentally ill. Months before Bill killed the Van Nest family, Seward represented another man accused of murder. The trial of that man, a black convict named Henry Wyatt, had taken place in Auburn. Seward defended Wyatt, who had killed another convict, on the grounds of insanity and obtained a hung jury. Retrial was set for June. Seward was encouraged to take Bill’s case and thereby increase his knowledge and skill in the defense of the criminally insane. He hoped that, through his defense of the case, the law of insanity would be developed to a more scientific and, in Seward’s mind, more humanistic level.

Seward was also drawn to Bill’s case due to his sympathy for the black race and his hatred of slavery and racism. Although he believed that whites were a “superior race” to blacks, he also believed and fought for the right of all men to vote. In 1846 he had declared that he would “give the ballot to every man, learned or unlearned, bound or free.”⁴

Along with his genuine humanitarianism, Seward also took Freeman’s case for pragmatic political reasons. Seward was a member of the Whig party. Its opposition, the Democratic party, was controlled by the proslav-ery forces of the South. The Democratic party had shown signs of growing strength in the North. At the same time, the antislavery Liberty party was gaining adherents in the North. Seward was afraid that the Liberty party would take votes away from the Whig party, resulting in a Democratic party victory in New York and in the nation. Seward and other influential Whigs pushed their compatriots to adopt positions against slavery and for Negro suffrage. He hoped his defenses of Wyatt and Freeman would gain publicity for the Whig program and expose the horrors of the existing racist system.

When Seward returned to his home and law office in Auburn and people heard that he was preparing to take Bill’s case, he began to receive hate mail and some of his friends urged him to reconsider. His father-in-law told him to “abandon the nigger.” But Frances encouraged her husband to defend Bill. He agreed with her, and ultimately Frances became active in the defense, doing research on mental illness. Seward’s strong feelings are evident in a letter he wrote to his best friend, Thurlow Weed.

There is a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman. People now rejoice that they did not lynch him; but they have al...