Law Enforcement

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Entry Category: Law Enforcement

Cummins Prison Break of 1940

The Cummins prison break on the morning of September 2, 1940, which was Labor Day, involved the escape of thirty-six white men from Cummins Unit (often referred to as Cummins prison farm), the largest of the three prison units in the state. The escape is the largest in Arkansas history. All the men were ultimately captured or killed by authorities. Four of the escapees were executed in Louisiana in 1941 for the murder of a deputy the day after they broke out of Cummins; these men claimed they escaped because of the horrible conditions at the prison farm. Despite an investigation into conditions at the prison, no serious attempt at reform was initiated. The 1940 escape was the first major …

Cummins Prison Strike of 1974

The Cummins prison strike of 1974 was a non-violent incident involving 200 inmates who stopped work for twenty minutes on Monday, October 14, to protest conditions at the Cummins prison farm. At 1,350 inmates at that time, Cummins—located five miles southeast of Grady (Lincoln County)—was the largest of the Arkansas prison farms. The strike was swiftly stopped by Cummins superintendent Art Lockhart, who used riot guards to ensure that prisoners returned quickly to work without any violence. By Tuesday, Cummins had returned to normal. The strike revealed that inmates could peacefully protest at that time without fear of severe physical punishment. It also showed that unrest still existed, and the prisons had more work to do before they achieved compliance …

Cummins Unit

aka: Cummins Prison Farm
Cummins Unit is a 16,600-acre maximum-security prison located five miles southeast of Grady (Lincoln County). Cummins is run by the Arkansas Department of Correction and houses male and female inmates. It is also the location of Arkansas’s facilities for administering the death penalty. Cummins is the oldest and largest of the state’s working “prison farms,” which use inmate labor to grow crops and produce livestock. In 1897, the Arkansas General Assembly established that the state could purchase “any lands, buildings, machinery, livestock and tools necessary for the use, preservation, and operation of the penitentiary.” In 1902, the state bought 10,000 acres of property—consisting of land from the Cummins and Maple Grove plantations—to create the Cummins prison farm. Cummins would later gain …

Davis, Jim (Trial and Execution of)

Beginning in the 1880s and increasingly as Jim Crow laws were instituted across the South, newspapers across the United States began to expand their coverage of Southern lynchings. In addition, publications like the Chicago Tribune and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama began to keep annual lists of lynchings. In her 1895 book The Red Record, Ida B. Wells-Barnett also attempted to include a comprehensive list of lynchings. Further examination of some newspaper accounts, however, shows that subsequent articles, particularly local to the site of the lynchings, later corrected these stories to indicate that no lynching had indeed happened. Other events that were described as lynchings were actually …

Dewees, Mary

A renowned reformer and advocate for prisoners’ rights, Mary Dewees was the first superintendent of the Arkansas State Farm for Women, the state’s first women’s prison, from 1920 to 1924. Mary Dewees was born on July 5, 1895, to Thomas B. Dewees and Lillie Dewees in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Bucknell University, where she studied social work and became well versed in the latest forms of progressive penology, especially ways to reform so-called wayward women. Dewees became director of education at New Jersey’s Clinton Farms reform school for women in 1918. At the age of twenty-five, Dewees was recruited by Grace Robson, another women’s reform pioneer who helped organize New Jersey’s first women’s reformatory in 1919. The following year, …

Dickinson, Thomas (Execution of)

Thomas Dickinson was hanged for murder at Arkansas Post (Arkansas County) in 1820 in the first legal public execution in the Arkansas Territory. A man named Thomas Dickinson was charged with rape in 1820 in the first criminal indictment ever returned by a grand jury in Arkansas. Dickinson was tried on January 8, 1820, and after deliberating twenty minutes, a jury convicted him of raping and impregnating a woman named Sally Hall. Judge Andrew Scott ordered that Dickinson “be castrated according to the law in that behalf provided, by a skilful [sic] physician, under the direction of the sheriff of Arkansas county, on the 15th February, 1820, between ten o’clock, A. M., and three o’clock, P. M., of that day.” …

Dixon, Giles (Execution of)

Giles Dixon (sometimes spelled Dickson or Dickerson) was hanged at Rockport (Hot Spring County) on September 7, 1877, for the shooting death of Nathaniel (or Matthew) McCall, a man in Clark County, several years earlier. The 1870 federal census shows Giles Dixon living in Clark County’s Caddo Township with his wife Mary, six children, and his 102-year-old mother. The thirty-five-year-old African American man was employed in a brick yard. On the evening of December 30, 1873, McCall, who lived on the Draper farm south of Arkadelphia (Clark County), opened the door to his house to see why his dog was barking and was shot with a double-barreled shotgun, which the Southern Standard newspaper reported was “loaded with buckshot, three taking …

Dowdy, John (Execution of)

John Dowdy was hanged at Camden (Ouachita County) on April 25, 1847, for murdering a Choctaw man (name unknown) in the first legal execution in Ouachita County. On January 31, 1847, an apparently drunk Choctaw man got into an argument “about a dog” with another man, who knocked him down. Dowdy rushed at the Choctaw man, with whom he “had not exchanged a word,” and stabbed him under the left arm with a clasp knife, “causing almost instant death.” Lawmen arrested Dowdy, who was brought before a justice of the peace and “committed to jail to await his trial before the Circuit Court.” While no accounts of the trial appear to survive, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced …

Dupree, Amos “General” (Execution of)

Amos Dupree, an African American man nicknamed “General,” was hanged at DeValls Bluff (Prairie County) on November 15, 1895, for the shotgun slaying of a romantic rival. Amos Dupree, described in the Arkansas Gazette as “a repulsive looking negro, as black as the sable hues of midnight,” lived in Monroe County, where he was “enamored” of Pennie Bonner, “a dusky damsel of engaging quality.” However, Ed (sometimes referred to as Robert) Harris, “a dude…arrayed in store clothes,” also pursued Bonner and “being possessed of an oily tongue soon succeeded in alienating the affections of Pennie Bonner from Dupree.” On June 15, 1894, Dupree snuck up on Harris as he was plowing a field and “without warning, proceeded to perforate Harris …

Edmunds, Howard (Execution of)

Howard Edmunds was hanged on December 9, 1881, in Warren (Bradley County) for the murder of his young sister-in-law with whom he had had an affair and impregnated. Edmunds, age twenty-six, was born in Fairfield County, South Carolina, and moved to Arkansas around 1877, settling in Monticello (Drew County) where he soon married his cousin, widow Minnie Stitt, the daughter of planter James R. Watson. Stitt’s sister (and also Edmunds’s cousin), sixteen-year-old Sallie Watson, was a frequent visitor to their home, and she and Edmunds began an affair that resulted in her becoming pregnant. In late June 1881, Howard and Minnie Edmunds and several friends went on a fishing trip during which Edmunds “was abstracted and absent minded to a …

Ellison, Eugene (Killing of)

The 2010 “police-involved shooting” death of Eugene Ellison in his own apartment in Little Rock (Pulaski County) became a local touchstone for a growing movement for police reform, one that picked up steam with the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2013. The killing resulted in the largest police shooting victims’ compensation in the history of Arkansas at the time. On December 9, 2010, across the street from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, off-duty Little Rock Police Department (LRPD) officer Donna Lesher fatally shot unarmed sixty-seven-year-old Eugene Ellison, an African-American man, during her evening patrol as a security guard. Lesher had confronted Ellison because of his open front door and asked Ellison if he was okay. Ellison, who …

Executions of April 2017

The State of Arkansas announced plans to carry out a total of eight executions over a eleven-day period in April 2017. Originally planned as four double executions scheduled for April 17, 20, 24, and 27, ultimately only four executions were carried out, including a double execution. On February 27, 2017, Governor Asa Hutchinson announced that eight men would be executed in April. The men scheduled to die were Don Davis and Bruce Earl Ward, scheduled to be executed on April 17; Ledell Lee and Stacey Johnson on April 20; Marcell Williams and Jack Jones Jr. on April 24; and Jason McGehee and Kenneth Williams on April 27. The execution protocol for the state utilized a three-drug cocktail consisting of Midazolam, …

Filmore, Isaac (Execution of)

On April 3, 1874, a sixteen-year-old Choctaw boy named Isaac Filmore was hanged in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of a German man who was traveling from California. According to the warrant issued for Filmore’s arrest in the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, on Saturday, July 19, 1873 (or thereabouts), he and another man named William Grayson (a.k.a. “Black Bill”) murdered the unnamed German man, who was “a white man and not an Indian.” Both Filmore and Grayson were arrested in the Creek Nation on July 21. Filmore reportedly made a voluntary statement when he was arrested. He said he was leaving town on Saturday (July 19) when he met Grayson. They were …

Fooy, Samuel W. (Execution of)

On September 3, 1875, a Native American man named Samuel W. Fooy was among the first six men to be executed in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) under “hanging judge” Isaac Parker. Fooy was convicted of robbing and killing a Kansas schoolteacher in Indian Territory several years earlier. Sam Fooy was born in Sebastian County in 1849. He was part Cherokee; his father was James E. Fooy of Memphis, Tennessee, and his mother was named Mary Ann. Sam married Amanda Talitha Beattie, and by 1872 they were living near Webbers Falls in the Cherokee Nation (in present-day Oklahoma). At the time of Fooy’s death, they had three children. An 1875 article in the Arkansas Gazette described him as “well educated and …

Ford, L. L. (Execution of)

L. L. Ford was one of two men hanged for the 1879 murder of a Crittenden County man, though many believed him innocent and he denied being involved in the crime. On October 26, 1879, four masked men rode up to the home of John Broadway, age fifty-five, about ten miles north of Marion (Crittenden County). One of them was John Potter, who worked for Broadway and believed that Broadway had $300 in his home. When Broadway tried to defend himself, another robber, Hiram Jeffries, shot him down. The four men fled, having netted only eight dollars. Potter, Jeffries, L. L. Ford, and Cal Huey were arrested and charged with Broadway’s murder. Huey got a change of venue to Mississippi …

Glory, Doghead (Execution of)

On February 4, 1853, a Native American man named Doghead Glory was executed in Benton County for the murder of a white man named David Scentie (sometimes referred to as David Scoutie) the previous year. The ruling that led to the execution provided an important precedent used at later trials. The most thorough account of Glory’s crime appears in his appeal to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which was heard during the January term of 1853. Apparently, a group of Native Americans—including Doghead Glory, his brother Moses Glory, Youngbird (or Young Bird), George Potatoe, and Cassalowa—went to see a show being held near the boundary with Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Around nightfall, Cassalowa approached a man identified only as Adair and …

Guerilla Execution of 1864 (Little Rock)

A pair of Confederate guerrillas—Jeremiah Earnest and Thomas Jefferson Miller—were hanged at the state penitentiary in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on March 18, 1864, for murdering three Unionists and threatening others. A native of Sevier County, Tennessee, farmer Jeremiah Earnest was living at South Fork in Montgomery County with his wife, Sarah, and their eight children when the Civil War began. He enrolled in Company F, Fourth Arkansas Infantry Regiment (CS) at Mount Ida (Montgomery County) on January 6, 1862, but was declared unfit for duty about four months later while suffering from dropsy and was released from the army. Earnest, age forty-three, recruited a home guard company, and Thomas Jefferson Miller, who had lived in Pike County and had …

Hall, Frank (Execution of)

Frank Hall was an African American man hanged in Little Rock (Pulaski County) on December 9, 1881, for murder, although he proclaimed his innocence up to his death. Frank Hall, also known as Lewis Hall, was born enslaved in Rowan County, North Carolina. Described as five feet ten inches tall and “when walking swaggers and is loose-jointed,” Hall was recruited to come to Arkansas as a laborer, finding work in Monroe County. The Arkansas Democrat reported that he soon became known as a “desperado,” suspected of murdering a man after moving to Lonoke County. He spent three years in prison for stealing money from a child and left Lonoke County after his release. He moved to a community about eight …

Harper, John (Execution of)

John Harper was a Black man hanged at Magnolia (Columbia County) on October 12, 1904, for the murder of his wife. On the night of February 26 or 27, 1904, John Harper hit his wife on the head with a fireplace poker or other heavy instrument, and after she fell to the ground, “thinking she was not dead…[he] poured coal oil on her and built a fire around her.” After he “burned the body to a crisp,” he dragged her corpse to their garden and buried her. Harper told neighbors that she had left him, but they were suspicious and contacted local law enforcement officers, who found her corpse in the garden. Harper “confessed his crime after being put in …