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OPINION
Our View
The Pardon
AUGUST 21 ▪ 2015
W
AJT
10
ith the centennial of Leo Frank’s lynching
behind us, it is time to confront the key
question: not whether Frank killed little
Mary Phagan in April 1913, but whether the state of
Georgia should officially recognize his innocence.
As friends and foes alike note, the pardon the
Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles approved in
1986 clears Frank’s record on the grounds that he was
denied due process during his trial and that the state
failed to protect him. The pardon offers no opinion
on whether Frank committed murder.
But Dale Schwartz, the lawyer who won the
pardon, explained during a centennial event at Congregation Etz Chaim that the compromise wording
of the pardon did not reflect doubts about Frank’s
innocence. Instead, some of the five board members
were concerned about the precedent of granting a
posthumous pardon and the risk of facing thousands
of similar petitions. The Anti-Defamation League still
expected to win a full pardon in 1984, only for the
board to turn down the request amid some suspicious
backroom wheeling and dealing.
After publishing roughly 10,000 words related to
the case in the Aug. 14 and 21 issues, we recognize that
we will never know with certainty how Phagan died.
Like most people who have studied the case, we believe that Frank is innocent and that janitor Jim Conley, the key witness against Frank, was the real killer.
But like Steve Oney, who wrote the definitive
book on the case, “And the Dead Shall Rise,” we recognize that there is no way to rule out Frank’s guilt.
If we were to retry Frank today, we are confident he
would be found not guilty. But not guilty is not the
same as innocent.
Certain physical evidence points away from
Frank and at Conley, including the coal dust found
in the girl’s lungs, indicating that she was still alive
when she was dumped in the National Pencil Co. factory basement, and Conley’s feces at the bottom of
the factory elevator shaft, whose intact state indi