Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era

5. Wolfgang Fuels the Assault

Chapter 5 Wolfgang Fuels the Assault Jack Greenberg, the Legal Defense Fund’s director in New York City, had assigned Frank Heffron to oversee the law students’ research efforts in the South. Heffron had been an editor of the Columbia Law Review , and his first job was as a Fund staff attorney. A “straight arrow” New Englander,1 he’d been blunt in his pessimistic assessment of this project. He feared the uncertainty of the outcome and stressed the need for “specialists” who could better mine the required data.2 First-year law students, untrained in the social sciences, might not be up to muster . Or they might be dissuaded from their search by threats, bullying, or worse. And there was always the fear that the vaults of the southern courthouses harboring the treasured data would be sealed once word leaked of the students’ mission. But as the weeks rolled by, the survey booklets relentlessly trickled in. Heffron examined them with intense concentration and soon had to admit that the amateur sleuths he’d sent south had succeeded in beguiling the entire southern legal establishment—judges, attorneys, court clerks, and peace officers alike. The students’ deceptively candid, open, and youthfully sincere demeanor had gained them access to virtually every shred of data needed from every county and state to which they had been assigned.3 The soft underbelly of the South’s rigid, apartheidlike system of justice now lay exposed in over three thousand ponderous booklets, waiting to be sliced and microscopically examined. A Delivery MarvinWolfgangwasnotsosure.ThecriminologistfromtheUniversity of Pennsylvania knew that student researchers, often enthusiastic at 66 Wolfgang Fuels the Assault the start, could find their interest soon waning as more tempting distractions (usually from the opposite sex) came along. The blazing Philadelphia sun that boiled its inhabitants that September of 1965 in the Gulf Stream’s humid, suffocating embrace, further tempered whatever optimism Wolfgang harbored. But Wolfgang’s guarded outlook would not last long. A knock on his office door jarred him to his feet. In walked a uniformed mail carrier bearing several packages bulging with mysterious contents. The postman slung the packages with a resounding thud onto Wolfgang’s desk. One of them, damaged by its ride from New York, ripped open and spewed a torrent of booklets. These were the surveys he had been waiting for, arduously assembled from over 250 counties across eleven southern and border states. The completed surveys contained what he needed to assess whether southern juries and judges had been discriminatory in their application of the death penalty.4 More packages were waiting in the mail carrier’s truck outside.5 Once they were all unloaded and signed for, Wolfgang immediately solicited his brightest graduate students for help in sorting out the data.6 He had no problem finding willing volunteers. The students were a devoted bunch, due in large part to the countless hours he had spent guiding their theses, paying their way to conferences, and trying to find them teaching jobs.7 But, though he had plenty of help, he did not have much time. His friend and faculty colleague Tony Amsterdam of Penn’s law school insisted on a quick and accurate assessment of what lay in the schedules. The lives of scores of black defendants were at stake as their execution dates neared. Amsterdam was sure many had been sentenced because of their race, but he had to prove it. And soon. Within a matter of days, his students assembled in one of the Wharton School’s classrooms. Wolfgang paced back and forth across the full length of the lecturer’s platform. He launched into a comprehensive explanation of how he wanted the data assembled and fed onto the computer punch cards. These were the days when computers were still a novelty, and the university’s technology was primitive. Wolfgang prioritized much of the work by state or county according to how soon a defendant faced execution.8 Frank Heffron and Norman Amaker, another Fund attorney, were assigned to keep Wolfgang abreast of pending execution dates.9 Wolfgang Fuels the Assault 67 Buying Time Meanwhile,theFund’slawyersdidtheirbesttobuytime.Theyrequested continuances to permit Wolfgang time to complete his analysis of the data. But they were not always successful. In the case of Louis Moorer Jr., a black defendant convicted of rape in South Carolina, District Court Judge Robert Hemphill denied Frank Heffron’s request for a sixty-day extension...