The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: The Story of the Prisonaires

7. What’ll You Do Next?

101 CHAPTER SEVEN What’ll You Do Next? I’m very proud of [the Prisonaires], and I miss that. There’s some things you can’t forget [and now] they’re all gone. —Johnny Bragg Marcel Sanders and John Drue were the first Prisonaires to be paroled. Sanders, who had refused release a year earlier, was effectively thrown out of the penitentiary on October 6, 1954. Drue, whose application for parole had been denied, was now deemed sufficiently rehabilitated and released. Proving the accuracy of his pessimistic preliminary inmate assessment, Drue violated the terms of his parole when he and an accomplice, Jack Birdsong, broke into the Kenneth O. Lester Company produce house and stole four hundred pounds of frozen chickens. Convicted of larceny and of receiving and concealing stolen property, Drue was sentenced to one to three years and returned to the penitentiary in early February 1955. He was paroled again in February 1957, this time with better results, as he never again spent a day behind bars. William Stewart, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Benny White beat Robert Lauderdale to death, had his sentence commuted from ninety-nine years to life, which allowed for his immediate release. State Attorney General Baxter Key and Judge John A. Mitchell wrote to Governor Frank Clement on October 21, 1954, unequivocally recommending commutation to life and parole when eligible. Having served fifteen years, Stewart was released on April 15, 1955. WhileStewart’scommutationandreleasereceivedlittlemediascrutiny, Clement’s decision to commute Ed Thurman’s ninety-nine-year sentence 102 / CHAPTER SEVEN to life, thereby making him too eligible for immediate parole, was far more controversial. Convicted of first degree murder in the death of John Will Hardimon, Thurman, who had acted in self-defense, was released two weeks after Stewart. “We have never believed that a man that gets into a fight and kills another Negro in an argument should be sentenced to 99 years,” noted the secretary of the parole board, Charles Crow. “The sentence is usually 2 to 10 years and sometimes 10 to 20 years. We thought the jury was a little tough in this case.”1 From Clement’s perspective, Thurman’s commutation involved little political risk in that he had already won the Democratic primary renomination for governor (once again over his old foe Gordon Browning ) by the widest margin in Tennessee history and had been reelected to the state’s highest office by a similar margin of victory. “Never before in Tennessee politics,” gushed the Nashville Banner, “has a young man demonstrated such tremendous strength as the 34-year-old Dickson Countian. . . . Tennessee believes in his capacity for dedicated stewardship [and] the effective and efficient administration of the state’s business .”2 With the governor’s term newly expanded from two to four years, Clement felt perfectly comfortable dipping into his sizeable cache of political equity to parole Thurman. Needless to say, the Tennessean was outraged by the commutation of Thurman’s sentence, its indignation prominently displayed in an overheated editorial published on April 29: Granted that a good tenor voice is an asset in some respects, it is startling now to find that it entitled a convicted murderer to his freedom after serving only 15 years of a 99-year prison sentence. That, however, seems to be the only plausible explanation for the release granted Edward L. Thurman, a member of the Prisonaires singing group which stands in so high with Governor Clement. . . . . . . [There] is nothing in his files to warrant his return to decent society after so brief a period. And in setting aside the sentence that Thurman received in the due course of justice, the governor and the parole board have flagrantly abused their authority. . . . Obviously the jury which heard the case did not think that the [sentence] was a “little tough” for a cold-blooded killer. Nor did the trial judge, who rejected a plea for a new trial. And neither did the Tennessee Supreme Court when the case was appealed to the high tribunal. Now, however, Governor Clement and the three-man parole board have taken it upon themselves to say that the jury, the trial judge and the Supreme What’ll You Do Next? / 103 Court were all wrong. They can cite no new evidence, and they can produce no recommendations for clemency from the officials of the county—Davidson —in which Thurman...