Trial of William Maxwell

The case of William L. Maxwell, an African American man convicted of rape in Arkansas in 1962, was an important early instance of the use of statistical evidence on behalf of criminal defendants facing the death penalty. It was also a significant precedent in the campaign against capital punishment in the United States.

At 3:00 a.m. on November 3, 1961, a man broke into the Hot Springs (Garland County) home of a thirty-five-year-old white woman, beat her ninety-year-old father, and then raped her. An hour later, the police arrested Maxwell, then twenty-two years old and with an eighth-grade education, in his parents’ house. The authorities took Maxwell to the local hospital, where the victim identified him. In the days that followed, he was held in a series of jails, at which, according to the police, he confessed repeatedly. Maxwell would later claim that the authorities did not allow him to see his parents or a lawyer and that he was mistreated and forced into signing a confession.

On November 7, Maxwell was charged with rape, and on November 28, the court appointed two lawyers to defend him. Maxwell spent nearly the entire month of December in the Arkansas State Hospital for Nervous Diseases, undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, but the head of the psychiatry department at the University of Arkansas Medical Center (now the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences) ultimately concluded that Maxwell was “without psychosis.” On January 15, 1962, he was arraigned and pleaded not guilty. He was convicted on March 21 and sentenced to die, as rape was a capital crime at that time. Maxwell’s attorneys had presented no evidence at trial, and numerous witnesses would later attest that talk of mob violence pervaded the courtroom.

In the years that followed, Maxwell appealed his conviction repeatedly, with numerous attorneys presenting arguments at every level of the state and federal judiciaries. Following state-court appeals, the Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed Maxwell’s conviction on May 27, 1963, and the execution was scheduled for January 24, 1964. Yet on January 20, just days before his execution, Maxwell’s attorneys filed a new challenge on constitutional grounds. They claimed that he was tried “in a hostile atmosphere,” that the jury selection had reflected racist discrimination, and that the death penalty for rape amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. A federal judge halted Maxwell’s execution while he considered the new arguments.

By mid-1965, attorneys with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund had joined Maxwell’s defense team, including Jack Greenberg and James M. Nabrit III. The NAACP attorneys decided to use Maxwell’s case (among several others) to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to declare capital punishment unconstitutional. That summer, the NAACP—working with Marvin Wolfgang, a University of Pennsylvania criminologist—dispatched law students into Arkansas (and across the South) to gather the data for a study of rape convictions and the death penalty in southern states. The data they collected ultimately revealed that an African American man convicted of raping a white woman in Arkansas had a fifty percent chance of receiving a death sentence, compared to just a fourteen percent chance for a man convicted of raping “a woman of his own race.”

Armed with this study, the NAACP argued that the death penalty was applied in an unconstitutionally discriminatory manner in Arkansas. Initially, this argument gained little traction. The district court denied Maxwell’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed the denial by a vote of 2–1. Judge Harry A. Blackmun wrote for the court, “The statistical argument is not at all persuasive,” and concluded that while the use of a racial slur at trial was “unfortunate,” it only happened twice. The Supreme Court refused to hear Maxwell’s appeal, and Governor Orval Faubus scheduled Maxwell’s execution for late July 1966.

Once again, however, Maxwell mounted a new constitutional challenge with just days to spare. On July 21, 1966, a federal judge stayed Maxwell’s execution, this time to hear arguments that death penalty for rape was unconstitutional, that Maxwell was mentally incompetent (and thus his execution would be unconstitutional), and that Arkansas statutes “dealing with the crime of rape and the punishment to be imposed therefor have been applied unconstitutionally to Negro men convicted of raping white women.” Once again, the district court rejected Maxwell’s arguments. The Eighth Circuit refused to hear the appeal, but on January 23, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened and sent the case back to the Eighth Circuit.

This returned Maxwell’s appeal to the chambers of Judge Blackmun, who privately agonized over the case. “I am frank to say that this case, like many of its Arkansas predecessors, has given me difficulty and is bothersome,” he wrote to his fellow judges on the Eighth Circuit. “I am fairly convinced that, over the years, justice in these interracial rape cases in the South has been something less than equal; yet I am persuaded by the record here that inequality for Maxwell has not been demonstrated, or even established on a prima facie basis.” In private, Blackmun forthrightly posited a reason that southern justice was so unequal: “To the white person interracial rape is abhorrent. Rape which is not interracial is less so and there the element of consent seems more readily accepted.” Nonetheless, Judge Blackmun again rejected Maxwell’s appeal, writing in a July 11, 1968, opinion: “We are not yet ready to condemn and upset the result reached in every case of a negro rape defendant in the State of Arkansas on the basis of broad theories of social and statistical injustice.”

The NAACP attorneys appealed one last time to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many advocates hoped that this case would be the vehicle to end the death penalty nationally. A number of public interest groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and American Psychiatric Association (APA), filed amicus briefs, raising broader constitutional concerns with capital punishment. More than 500 executions nationwide were paused while the Court considered Maxwell’s appeal. In the end, however, the Court decided Maxwell’s case on narrow grounds.

On June 1, 1970, by a vote of 6–1, the Court lifted Maxwell’s death sentence (due to the exclusion of jurors who had “scruples against the death penalty”) but avoided definitively deciding the constitutionality of capital punishment, as many had anticipated. This was likely because the Court wanted to give its newest justice, Harry Blackmun, a chance to participate. (Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s first African American justice and a former NAACP attorney, recused himself from Maxwell’s case.)

Upon hearing of the Supreme Court’s decision, Maxwell’s mother—Jessie B. Maxwell—told the press that “it seems like a big load has been lifted off my shoulders.” She continued: “I just feel overwhelmed and overjoyed to hear that the death penalty has been taken off my son. I just hope that the states will abolish it for everyone.”

On December 29, 1970, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller commuted Maxwell’s sentence, along with the sentences of fourteen other death row prisoners. The decision proved to be highly controversial, leading some state legislators to call for “stripping governors of such power.” Maxwell was paroled in 1974 and returned to Hot Springs. He died there in 1995, at the age of fifty-six.

In the years following Maxwell’s legal victory, the U.S. Supreme Court continued to debate the death penalty. In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the justices voted 5–4 that capital punishment was unconstitutional as applied nationwide. In the aftermath of this decision, however, public opinion turned in favor of the death penalty, and in 1976, the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia. Nonetheless, in Coker v. Georgia (1977)—another case that the NAACP brought on the basis of statistical evidence—the Supreme Court eliminated the death penalty for rape. In 1994, Justice Blackmun would personally renounce capital punishment, concluding that “the death penalty experiment has failed.”

For additional information:
“A Big Load Off of Her Shoulders.” Blytheville Courier News, June 2, 1970, p. 3.

Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994).

“Counsel Named for Negro Held in Rape Case.” Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, November 29, 1961, p. 12.

Coyne, Randall. “Making the Progress of a Humane Justice: Blackmun’s Death Penalty Epiphany.” University of Kansas Law Review 43 (January 1995): 367.

“Execution Petition Is Filed.” Arkansas Democrat, January 21, 1964, p. 9.

Greenberg, Jack. Crusaders In the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Jordan, Tom, and Elta Spriggs. “Father of Maxwell: ‘I’m Glad. I’m More Than Glad!’” Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, December 31, 1970, p. 10.

Jordan, Wayne. “Five Who Lived on Death Row Shaping New Lives.” Arkansas Gazette, February 1, 1976, p. 20A.

“Judicial Freeze Remains on Executions.” Arkansas Democrat, June 2, 1970, p. 8B.

“Little Rock.” Jonesboro Sun, December 30, 1961, p. 6.

Mandery, Evan J. A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

Maxwell v. Bishop case file, Folder 652, Box 40. Harry A. Blackmun Papers, Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Maxwell v. Bishop, 257 F. Supp. 710 (E.D. Ark. 1966), aff’d, 398 F.2d 138, 147 (8th Cir. 1968), judgment vacated, 398 U.S. 262 (1970).

Maxwell v. Bishop, 385 U.S. 650 (1967).

Maxwell v. State, 370 S.W.2d 113 (Ark. 1963).

Maxwell v. Stephens, 229 F. Supp. 205 (E.D. Ark. 1964), aff’d, 348 F.2d 325 (8th Cir. 1965), cert. denied, 382 U.S. 944 (1965).

“Nearly 500 on Nation’s Death Rows Await Outcome of Arkansas Appeal.” Arkansas Gazette, July 31, 1969, p. 19A.

“Reprieve Is Given to Maxwell.” Arkansas Democrat, June 1, 1970, pp. 1A–2A.

“Spa Rape Case Ready for Jury.” Arkansas Democrat, March 21, 1962, p. 18.

Stern, Scott W. There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025.

“Study Indicates Discrimination in Rape Cases.” Arkansas Gazette, August 21, 1966, p. 8A.

“Supreme Court to Decide Maxwell Case.” Arkansas Democrat, May 10, 1970, p. 3D.

“William L. Maxwell.” Hot Springs Sentinel-Record, October 11, 1995, p. 2.

Woodward, Bob, and Scott Armstrong. The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

Scott W. Stern
Oakland, California