Prosecutor might seek posthumous exoneration of sharecropper

ATLANTA — A Georgia district attorney said he may revisit a decadesold case in which the state Supreme Court overturned three murder convictions of a Black sharecropper in the killing of a white man to determine whether the sharecropper deserves to be formally exonerated posthumously.

Weaknesses in the case were detailed in a book published this year, “The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson.”

Carroll County District Attorney Herb Cranford has launched a review of the case and could ask a judge to formally clear Henderson’s name, as charges against him were never dismissed, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

“When a past case is brought to my attention, regardless of its age, and a credible claim can be made that the accused was wrongly charged or convicted, I believe the pursuit of justice includes reviewing the case to determine if an injustice occurred in the past,” Cranford told the newspaper.

Henderson was tried and convicted three times for the 1948 killing of 22-year-old Carl “Buddy” Stevens Jr., a Georgia Tech student who was shot while on a date in Carrollton, a town about 40 miles west of Atlanta.

Henderson was arrested more than a year after the killing, and defense lawyers, including a biracial team funded by the NAACP, repeatedly poked holes in the prosecution’s case. Those questions, including some focusing on the alleged murder weapon at a time when forensic science was in its infancy, weren’t enough to persuade jurors to acquit Henderson. But they helped persuade appeals courts to repeatedly overturn the conviction. In January 1953, Henderson was allowed to post bail and leave jail, but the charges were never dropped.

Cranford said he is reviewing trial transcripts, state Supreme Court opinions and other records to decide whether to seek judicial action.

“In this particular case, the fact that Mr. Henderson had his conviction overturned three separate times by the Georgia Supreme Court and the fact the state never sustained a conviction against him provides a sufficient basis in my view to review the case,” Cranford said.

Cranford, who has been in office since 2018, said he didn’t know about the case until the book was published.

Clarence Henderson died 40 years ago. His great-grandson, Brandon Henderson, said the family knew he had been accused of killing a white man and that he had escaped the death penalty, but they weren’t familiar with the details until now. He said as he learned about his greatgrandfather’s trials, he was “floored” by the inequality of the segregation-era courts.