Joan Little's Story

In the dark-paneled courtroom in Raleigh, N.C., the 21-year-old black defendant testified in a voice that was so low that jurors often had to cup their ears to catch her words. She clutched a tissue but broke down in tears only once. Otherwise, Joan Little remained remarkably self-possessed through two days of painful testimony and crossexamination, sticking stoutly to her story that she had been defending herself from rape when she stabbed white Jailer Clarence Alligood to death with an ice pick in the Beaufort County Jail in Washington, N.C., on Aug. 27,1974.

Her appearance on the witness stand was the climactic moment in the five-week-old trial, which had become a cause celebre among feminists and civil rights activists (TIME, July 28). Citing mostly circumstantial evidence, Prosecutor William Griffin contended that she lured the 62-year-old jailer into her cell with a promise of sex and then killed him in order to escape from the jail, where she had spent 81 days after being convicted of breaking and entering.

Weeping Jurors. Joan Little's version of what happened was far different and so affecting that two of the black women jurors wept. According to her story, Alligood came to her cell in search of sex three times between 10 p.m. on Aug. 26 and 3 a.m. on Aug. 27. Rebuffed the first time, he returned with a present of cigarettes and sandwiches. He left, but soon came back. "By then," she testified, "I had changed into my nightgown. He was telling me I really looked nice in my gown, and he wanted to have sex with me." Alligood pulled off his trousers and shoes in the hall and entered her cell with a grin. "He said he had been nice to me, and it was time I was nice to him. I told him I didn't feel like I should be nice to him that way." Her voice becoming almost inaudible, she testified that Alligood fondled her, then removed her nightgown. "That's when I noticed he had the ice pick in his hand."

Her voice faltering, she told how Alligood had dragged her to the floor of the cell, held the ice pick to her face and forced her to engage in an act of oral sex. "I didn't know what he was UP, going to do, whether he was going to kill me," she said. After three to five minutes, Alligood's grip on the ice pick loosened. "I reached for the ice pick, he reached for the ice pick, I got to it first. I hit him with it while he was sitting on the bunk. He came at me ... Each time he came, I struck at him. He grabbed me by the wrists, then he was behind me. I put my feet against the bunk to place my weight against him. I hit him over my right shoulder. He fell middleway on the bunk forward, his head facing the wall, his knees on the floor."

Despite repeated, often shouted questions, Prosecutor Griffin failed to shake her story. Why had she never "screamed, hollered, slapped or run" from Alligood? "Mr. Griffin, if you had been a woman, you wouldn't have known what to do either. I was scared." Why hadn't she reported Alligood's earlier advances? "In Washington, N.C., coming up as a black woman, it's different saying what you did and having your word go up against a white person's." Griffin took her over the painful details again and again. "Did you go down on your knees in front of the bunk?" he asked. When she did not respond, he shouted the question three more times, until she said softly, "He forced me down."

After the prisoner's testimony, many spectators expected a quick verdict. Indeed, three minutes after the jury left the courtroom to deliberate, Judge Hamilton Hobgood was giving a folksy thank-you speech to lawyers and reporters when he was interrupted by a knock on the door. But instead of a verdict, it was a juror with a question: "Where's the sugar for the coffee?" No matter. It took the six white and six black jurors only 1 hr. and 25 min. to reach the obvious decision: not guilty.

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