Two chain gang guards, one of them captain of the guard, with several years’ service to his credit, have been sentenced to serve 20 years in the State prison for the death of a negro convict. The guards pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were given the full term provided by law for such cases.
Judge Sinclair, who presided at the trial of the men charged with taking Joseph Needleman from a county jail and mutilating him, sentenced the two guards and he made it plain that he gave them the limit of the law because he felt they deserved an even more severe sentence, and he hinted that a verdict of second degree murder would have been possible had the case gone to trial.
The negro who died after he is alleged to have been severely flogged by the guards, who then hitched him to a mule and had him dragged for some distance. The case was given to a grand jury a few days after the negro died; the grand jury immediately returned its indictment and the two men had been arraigned and sentenced in less than a week after the flogging took place.
This is another instance in which justice in North Carolina moved swiftly and accurately, and while such dispatch of duty by the courts is certain to have a very fine influence, we must go deeper in the matter of treatment of prisoners in North Carolina.
A few days before this negro was ill-treated, reports from Gastonia told of horrible conditions in a prison camp in that county. Thirty-odd prisoners had been sleeping in a tiny shack that was not properly ventilated. Their beds were lousy, said the Gastonia reports, and the men were forced to sleep in their clothes without sheets on their cots. Nothing has been heard of this matter since the grand jury made its first report, and apparently everything has been done to cover it up, but the fact remains just the same that something is rotten with a system that will permit such conditions to exist.
The system is wrong and such conditions as were revealed in Gaston county will continue until a change is made. The same is true in regard to the case in which the negro was so man-handled that he died. There should not be in operation a system that will give guards an opportunity to take such action as was taken against this prisoner.
From the editorial page of The Concord Daily Tribune, Thursday, June 11, 1925
digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1925-06-11/ed-1/seq-7/#words=June+11%2C+1925+June+11.+1925
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