13. Leo Frank was lynched after his sentence was commuted
Leo Frank was convicted in a 1913 trial of the murder of a 13-year-old girl, an employee in the factory which he supervised. On April 27, 1913, the body of Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta. She had been strangled sometime the preceding day. Several employees of the company were suspected of committing the crime, and several were arrested, but it was Leo Frank, the factory superintendent, who was indicted for the murder. Another employee, a janitor named Conley, claimed to have been complicit in the murder and turned state’s evidence against Frank. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death.
Several appeals were made by Frank and his lawyers, but to no avail, and in 1915 their final appeal to the United States Supreme Court was denied. By that time additional evidence, including some available at the time of the trial but not introduced in court was presented to Georgia’s governor, and he commuted the death sentence to one of life in prison. National coverage of the case was heavily critical of the conviction and of Georgia’s evident antisemitism. After the sentence was commuted, a mob broke into Frank’s cell, took the prisoner hostage, and hanged him in Marietta, Georgia, the hometown of Mary Phagan. Though Frank was not exonerated, in 1986 he was officially pardoned by the state, though the consensus by then was that Conley, not Frank, had murdered the girl.