70 years after his execution, the Martinsville Seven, a group of African Americans accused of rape in the United States, have been pardoned.

A group of African Americans, known in America as the Martinsville Seven, convicted by all-white juries of raping a white woman and executed in 1951, to have received a posthumous grace.

The unusual pardon was granted by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, who, after meeting with relatives of those convicted last Tuesday and hearing their demands, decided to grant them a pardon.

Family members erupted into applause and several covered their faces and sobbed after hearing the government’s decision.

” Seventy years. Seventy years!” exclaimed Pamela Hairston, one of the convicts’ relatives, who had been writing letters for nearly three decades to draw attention to the case.

Northam has issued a series of “ordinary pardons”, which do not address the guilt or innocence of those convicted, but recognize that cases have been treated “in an unequal racial manner” and that there have been loopholes. in the process, his office told media.

The governor has granted more than 600 pardons since taking office in January 2018, exceeding the total number granted by the previous nine governors of Virginia, according to his office.

The Martinsville case became a controversial civil rights issue shortly after the men were arrested in January 1949.

That month, a 32-year-old white woman walked alongside a group of black men drinking by the railroad tracks in the town of Southside, Va., When she said she was approached by one of them.

Over a period of approximately two hours the woman said at trial that several of the men raped her repeatedly, threatened to kill her if she screamed and dragged her into the forest afterwards, from where she was able to escape, tells the newspaper.

Police quickly arrested seven black men and submitted their signed confessions. Although all seven reportedly confessed to having had sex or attempted to have sex with the woman, their descriptions of the events differed and all have pleaded not guilty to the rape charges.

Several of the defendants were illiterate and unable to read their own confessions, and none had a lawyer present when they signed the statement. They were sentenced in just eight days and executed by electric chair in February 1951.

The case sparked protests in the White House and highlighted great inequality in Virginia’s criminal justice system: between 1908 and 1951, 45 men were executed for rape and all were black, the newspaper recalls.

(with information from the EFE)

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