Trial by Jury

On the night of Feb. 15, a Greenville, S.C., taxi driver named Thomas Watson Brown was robbed and then stabbed to death by a passenger. Police thought the passenger was a 24-year-old Negro named Willie Earle. They arrested him and put him in jail at nearby Pickens. In the early morning of Feb. 17, a mob of white men went to Pickens, got Willie Earle out of jail and lynched him (TIME, Feb. 24).

South Carolina's Governor J. Strom Thurmond thundered a demand that the mob be brought to justice. Greenville County deputy sheriffs and city police jumped into action. In a few days, with a hand from the FBI, they rounded up 31 men, got signed statements from 26 of them admitting participation in the lynching. The State Attorney General assigned a crack prosecutor, Samuel Ruth Watt of Spartanburg, to the case. In March, a grand jury indicted all 31 of the men for the murder of Willie Earle.

Last week, in Greenville's yellow brick courthouse, the trial began. It was the biggest lynching trial the South had ever known. Day after day, the courtroom was jammed with shirt-sleeved spectators. Hundreds were turned away.

They Meant Business. The defendants--all but three of them Greenville taxi drivers--seemed ill at ease. Few wore coats or ties; many chewed gum incessantly. Some were accompanied by their wives (in South Carolina, a man on trial for a capital crime is entitled to have his wife with him).

On the bench sat Judge James Robert Martin Jr. A strapping onetime Washington & Lee football player, Judge Martin, at 37, is known all over South Carolina as a firm, fair man. He made it plain from the beginning that he would stand for no nonsense.

Midway in the second day, selection of an all-white jury was completed. Prosecutor Watt got down to work. His first witness was J. Ed Gilstrap, 62, the jailer at Pickens. Ed told about turning Willie Earle over to the mob. "I thought they meant business," he said, grinning. "They had a gun." Who was in the mob? Ed wasn't sure.

Sam Watt wasted little time with Ed Gilstrap. The main body of his evidence lay in the statements signed by 26 of the defendants. The statements named names, times, places. Without them, the state had a flimsy case. Sam Wratt started to read the statement of Willie Eugene Bishop. 27, one of the taxi drivers.

Defense Attorney Tom Wofford objected strenuously. The statements, he claimed, might be legal evidence against their individual makers, but not against other defendants. The statements had not been made under oath; the defense charged that they had been obtained under duress.

"Give Me the Gun." Reserving decision, Judge Martin ruled that they should be conditionally admitted into evidence. Sam Watt began to read. Willie Bishop's statement said that, at 3 a.m. on Feb. 17, he was in the Yellow Cab Co. office when he heard talk "about going over to Pickens . . . to get the Negro who had cut Mr. Brown." The drivers bought whiskey, drank a lot of it. Soon a caravan of cabs was on its way to Pickens.

Other statements told what happened to Willie Earle after he had been taken a few miles out into the countryside. Somebody "pulled the Negro out of the car by his belt." The drivers ''hit him several times with their fists and knocked him to the ground." One of the drivers pulled out a knife. "Before you kill him," he said, "I want to put the same scars on him that he put on Brown." Said Jessie Lee Sammons: "I could hear the tearing of clothing and flesh."

Then the drivers "beat the side of his head with a shotgun." Said Marvin H. Flemming's statement: "I could hear some licks like they were pounding on him with the butt end of a gun. I heard the Negro say, 'Lord, you done killed me.' " Finally, said Charlie Covington, he heard Roosevelt Carlos Hurd Sr., a Blue Bird cab driver, cry out: "Give me the gun and let's get this over with." Just then, "a tall, slender boy with bushy hair hit the Negro in the mouth and knocked him down. The Negro started to get up when Mr. Hurd took the shotgun. He shot the Negro in the head. He unloaded the gun and called for more shells. . . . Mr. Hurd shot the Negro two more time's." The tissue of Willie Earle's brain was left hanging on the bushes. The lynchers went back to Greenville and drank coffee.

Just Turned Around. In all, nine defendants named Roosevelt Carlos Hurd as the trigger man. Tough, bespectacled little Mr. Hurd denied that he had shot Willie Earle. Said his account of the lynching: "Somebody fired a gun two or three times. I don't know who fired the gun. I did not have a gun. . . . When I seen they were going to kill the Negro, I just turned around because I did not want to see it happen."

With that, the prosecution rested its case. This week Judge Martin ruled that the statements could indeed be admitted as evidence--but only as each one applied to the man who made it. He dismissed all charges against three defendants, reduced the charges against seven others, leaving 21 on trial for murder. The defense offered no testimony. One day was set aside for arguments, one for the judge's charge to the jury. Whatever the verdict, Prosecutor Watt and Judge Martin had displayed both courage and fairness.

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