MACON, Ga. — It’s been 106 years since 13-year-old Mary Phagan’s sexually assaulted, bruised, bloody and lifeless body was found in the basement of the National Pencil Company in Marietta.
It’s been 104 years since Leo Frank, the superintendent of the pencil company, was dragged from his prison cell in Milledgeville and hauled to Marietta, where a group of Cobb County’s prominent citizens hanged him at the town square.
On Tuesday, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes is scheduled to discuss the lynching with students at Mercer University’s Walter F. George School Law. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Law Group in Marietta, is the attorney in charge of a modern attempt to exonerate Frank.
“It’ll make a good study for law students to see what happens when good folks allow passion to overcome the law,” Barnes said in a recent interview with 13 WMAZ.
Barnes said he’s been fascinated with the Frank case since he was kid. Barnes said he’s also convinced of Frank’s innocence.
The murder happened on April 26, 1913. According to reports, Phagan had gone to the pencil factory to get her pay. Frank paid her, and he became the last person to confirm he’d seen her alive.
Around midnight, the watchman found Phagan’s body. Frank was arrested three days later and charged with murder.
Prior to his arrest, four other men had been arrested in connection with the murder. Those charges were dismissed.
On May 1, 1913, however, Jim Conley, a janitor at the pencil factory, was arrested after he was seen rinsing what looked like blood from a shirt. Conley wasn’t charged and later became a primary witness against Frank.He testified that that Frank forced him to help get rid of the body.
During and after the trial, many believed the anti-Semitism had a profound influence on the outcome. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death.
His appeals went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although justices, Oliver Wendell Homes and Charles Evans Hughes dissented, the high court upheld his conviction and sentence.
“Mob rule does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury,” Holmes and Hughes wrote in their dissent.
With appeals over, Frank’s attorney asked Gov. John Slaton to commute the sentence. Slaton viewed trial documents and visited the pencil factory.
Although Slaton believed Frank was innocent, he commuted his sentence to life in prison instead of death. His decision didn’t sit well with anti-Frank people, who protested in the streets around Atlanta and Marietta.
Slaton declared martial law and called out the National Guard to restore order. When his gubernatorial term ended a few days later, police escorted him and his wife to a railroad station where the couple caught a train out of state.
Because his sentence was commuted to life, Frank began serving his time at a prison farm in Milledgeville.
A fellow inmate slashed his throat during his brief stint at the prison. He survived the slashing only to be yanked from the prison on Aug. 16, 1915 by 25 prominent citizens of Marietta.
Barnes said his wife’s grandfather drove the vehicle that carried Franks from the prison to the Marietta hanging tree.
In 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole pardoned Frank. The following statement accompanied the pardon:
“Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence, and in recognition of the State’s failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the State’s failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds, the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, in compliance with its Constitutional and statutory authority, hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a Pardon.”
The pardon came four years after Alonzo Mann testified that he was an office boy at the pencil factory when the murder happened. He testified that he saw Conley – the star witness at Frank's trial – carrying Phagan’s body to the basement on the day she was murdered.
Mann said he didn’t say anything about it because Conley threatened to kill him if he told anyone. Mann said his mother also told him to keep quiet.
Mann was 83 years old when he finally testified.
Almost a century after the Phagan murder, Barnes said Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard breathed new life in the Frank case. They created a commission to examine old convictions and determine if they were handled properly.
Because of his lifelong interest in the Frank case, Barnes says he jumped at the opportunity to handle it.
The former governor’s been compiling material for the case and hopes he’ll be able to file it next year. Meanwhile, he’ll rehash his findings and concerns over how the Frank case was handled when he meets with the Mercer law students Tuesday.
Barnes was Georgia’s 80th governor, serving from 1999-2003.
