An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank
Product Code: 9780822589440
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Description
On April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan went to the Atlanta pencil factory where she worked to pick up her paycheck. Mary never left that building alive, and her battered body was found on its premises a few hours later by a fellow employee. Suspicion fell on the African-American watchman who first contacted the police. Over a short period of time, law enforcement officers came to suspect Leo Frank the New York-born Jewish factory supervisor of committing the murder. Frank was arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced to death, commuted to life in prison, and then lynched. The trial and subsequent events remain among the more controversial legal actions of that era. In this insightful account, award-winning author Elaine Marie Alphin precisely analyzes the Phagan murder and Frank trial. Leo Frank's trial demonstrated the type of rabid prejudice that typified much of American society during an age when discrimination was the norm. Leo Frank eventually paid the ultimate price because he was a northerner who worked as a manager, and because he was Jewish. By telling the story of Leo Frank, Elaine Alphin not only chronicles an important event in the history of civil rights in America but also the story of one innocent man's terminal experience in the justice system of his day and ag