10. The Griffin brothers and the murder of John Lewis
John Lewis, according to local lore, was a Confederate Army veteran who was killed by gunshot in his South Carolina home in 1913. Two nearby farmers, Thomas Griffin and younger brother Meeks Griffin, were charged with the crime of murder. The two men were in their twenties and among the wealthiest in the rural community, a fact which did not sit well with some of their white neighbors, who resented successful black men. The case was further muddied by evidence that Lewis, white and in his seventies, had been involved in an affair with 22-year-old Anna Davis, who was black, married, and employed by Lewis. A local petty criminal named John Stevenson accused the brothers of the killing, later recanting and explaining that he had done so because he believed the Griffins had enough money to “afford a lawyer and beat the rap”.
By then it was too late, the Griffin brothers had been convicted of murder on Stevenson’s testimony and the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Both brothers were executed in South Carolina’s electric chair. Before they went to their deaths, more than 100 influential white South Carolinians, including the local sheriff and the foreman of the jury at their trial petitioned the governor to intercede. He did not. In 2009, following a campaign coordinated by radio host Tom Joyner, the conviction was overturned and the Griffin brothers were pardoned. Legal scholars agreed that there was nothing in the way of evidence linking the brothers to the crime for which they were convicted and executed, and who murdered John Lewis became a subject of speculation a century after the crime occurred.