Law Enforcement

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Entry Category: Law Enforcement

Peters, Albert (Execution of)

Albert Peters was a young African American man hanged on December 30, 1887, at Marianna (Lee County) for murdering the husband of his “paramour.” Albert Peters was born into slavery at the Dr. G. B. Peters Plantation near Council Bend in Lee County on October 10, 1860. His family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, after the Civil War, and then to Phillips County, where he attended Southland College. Peters was later described as “very black, medium hight [sic] and weight, clean shaven face and had a tolerable fair education, being able to read very well and write a respectable hand.” By 1885, he was once again living on the Peters plantation but, early that year, went to Phillips County, “where he …

Pettus, Phillip (Execution of)

Phillip Pettus was an African American man hanged on August 24, 1894, in Helena (Phillips County) after being convicted of first-degree murder for killing his wife. Phillip Pettus may be the same man listed in the 1880 census as H. P. Pettice, age twenty-eight, a “mulatto” farmer who lived in Phillips County’s Cypress township with his wife, Emma, age twenty-three, and their two sons. By 1893, Pettus reportedly “mistreated his wife” to the point that she left him and went to work at another plantation near Hyde Park (Phillips County). Pettus repeatedly begged her to return to him, but she refused. Pettus told her that “she had better say prayers[,] for if she refused to live with him she would …

Phillips County Penal Farm Historic District

The Phillips County Penal Farm Historic District, located on Phillips County Road 353 south of U.S. 49 near Poplar Grove, contains a main jail building constructed of concrete with a large concrete block section at the rear, two additional concrete block jail buildings, and a cast-concrete water tower. The complex is no longer in use and is heavily overgrown, but it still reflects its original use as a county prison farm. According to Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Eastern Arkansas, a sturdy jail was a local priority from the earliest days of Phillips County. The first structure built for county use was a two-story log building that housed a courtroom above and a jail below, which were soon replaced …

Pippin, Essex (Execution of)

Essex Pippin (sometimes listed as Pipkin), a nineteen-year-old African American man, was hanged at Vanndale (Cross County) on October 11, 1901, after being convicted of raping two women. On July 29, 1901, a man reportedly raped a Black woman named Leah Wooden and then attacked Mrs. Allen Taylor, described in contemporaneous newspaper accounts as “a respectable white woman, who is the wife of a prominent farmer living near Wynne” in Cross County. Essex Pippin, who lived about a quarter mile from Vanndale, was soon arrested and rushed to the state penitentiary in Little Rock (Pulaski County) by local lawmen to protect him from “lynching at the hands of a rapidly forming excited populace,” providing “a narrow escape from death by …

Poe, Harry (Trial and Execution of)

Harry Poe was the first person legally executed in Garland County, Arkansas. On January 18, 1910, Harry Poe, an African American teenager, allegedly raped Lena Adams, a younger white girl. A Garland County court convicted Poe of rape on March 1, 1910, and sentenced him to death. Several residents of the county believed that Poe was innocent and attempted to save his life. On September 2, 1910, Harry Poe was executed. The details of Poe’s life before the alleged rape are unclear. Available newspapers variously listed his age as seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen, and provided no details about his life before the incident. Census records do not provide any likely matches for Harry Poe. A writer for the Arkansas Democrat described him in overtly racist language as “a thick-lipped, low-browed, bestial type of negro.” On January …

Pointer, John (Execution of)

On April 3, 1874, a young Native American man named John Pointer was executed in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for allegedly murdering a white man named Blue in Choctaw Territory in 1872. Although there was some doubt as to how thorough authorities were in pursuing defense witnesses, Pointer was eventually executed for the crime. According to historian Jerry Akins, Pointer was an eighteen-year-old Seminole man “of middle size and good countenance.” According to Pointer’s story, he and his brother and Sam McGee were near the Canadian River in the Choctaw Nation when McGee declared that he intended to kill someone. When they met a drover named Blue, McGee said he would kill him, and the Pointer brothers tried to dissuade …

Prison Reform

The poor condition of Arkansas prisons has long been a subject of controversy in the state. The national prison system as a whole, and particularly in the South, was substandard up to the 1960s. Repeated scandal, evidence of extensive violence and rape, and violation of human rights brought national attention to Arkansas, placing pressure on the state to reform its penal system. Through a series of reforms beginning in 1967, the Arkansas prison system greatly improved, although issues of overcrowding still plague the state today. Calls for prison reform began in the late nineteenth century, especially with regard to the system of convict leasing, whereby prisoners were rented out to labor for private enterprises, often in horrible conditions. Governor George …

Pulaski County Penal Farm

From 1918 to 1974, the Pulaski County government operated a prison facility—commonly known as the County Farm—on a 640-acre farm located west of Little Rock (Pulaski County) at the confluence of the Arkansas River and the Little Maumelle River. After the facility was closed in 1974 as a result of an order by a federal judge, the site later became Two Rivers Park, which is accessed from State Highway 10 on County Farm Road. The County Farm was preceded by a series of “convict camps” and “convict farms.” In the early twentieth century, the prisoners were used for labor for county roads and bridges and were contracted out to private concerns for farm labor and land clearing. These early facilities were …

Quadruple Execution of 1923

Four inmates were executed on February 2, 1923, at the Arkansas State Penitentiary. This event marked the largest number of executions carried out by the state in a single day up to that point. Three were convicted of a murder committed in Ashley County, while the fourth was executed for two murders committed in Stone County. Ira Culp, a farmer near Wilmot (Ashley County), was murdered on the night of May 11, 1922. On the night of the murder, a group of horseback men from Bonita, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana, approached the Culp home. (Bonita is approximately seven miles south of the Arkansas state line.) While the motive for the crime is unclear, it is apparent that the men knew Culp, …

Quadruple Execution of 1926

Four Black men from Ouachita County were executed on February 12, 1926, for the 1925 murder of a filling station owner despite disavowing their confessions on the eve of being put to death. James M. Moore, age sixty-five, operated a gas station and store at McMahon’s Chapel near his home in Frenchport (Ouachita County), south of Camden (Ouachita County). On the evening of July 13, 1925, his daughters Trixie and Grace Moore drove to the station to give him a ride home. As they drove away from the store, they were attacked by bandits. The initial article in the Arkansas Gazette reported that they had just left “when a masked bandit stepped into the highway…and demanded that those in the …

Rector, Elias

Elias Rector was appointed U.S. marshal for the Territory of Arkansas later served as superintendent of Indian Affairs. During the Civil War, he sought to make treaties with Native American tribes on behalf of the Confederacy. Rector was the subject of the poem “The Fine Arkansas Gentleman, Close to the Choctaw Line,” written by his friend Albert Pike. Elias Rector was born on September 28, 1802, in Fauquier County, Virginia. He was the youngest of nine sons born to Wharton Rector and Mary Vance Rector, who was a native of North Carolina. Soon after his birth, the family moved to Illinois, where Elias Rector spent the early part of his youth. The family relocated again, this time to St. Louis, …

Reeves, Bass

Arkansas native Bass Reeves was one of the first Black lawmen west of the Mississippi River. As one of the most respected lawmen working in Indian Territory, he achieved legendary status for the number of criminals he captured. Bass Reeves was born enslaved in Crawford County in July 1838. His owners, the William S. Reeves family, moved to Grayson County, Texas, in 1846. During the Civil War, Bass became a fugitive slave and found refuge in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma) amongst the Creek and Seminole Indians. Reeves is believed to have served with the irregular or regular Union Indians that fought in Indian Territory during the Civil War. After the Civil War, Reeves settled in Van Buren (Crawford County) with …

Reeves, Willis (Execution of)

Willis Reeves was hanged on July 15, 1881, in Van Buren (Crawford County) in a botched but ultimately successful execution for the slaying of an African American youth the previous year. Willis Reeves, who a newspaper wrote was “chunky, muscular, dark-brown and had a malignant countenance,” became involved “in a dispute” with a Black youth named John Drake in Van Buren on June 6, 1880. Reeves ending up pulling a pistol and shooting Drake in the head, killing him. Though no accounts appear to chronicle Reeves’s trial for murder, he was found guilty and sentenced to hang on July 15, 1881. Reeves would later try to escape in hopes of being shot and said he “bet a thousand dollars he …

Rose, Henry (Execution of)

Henry Rose was an African American man hanged at Osceola (Mississippi County) on April 4, 1884, for the shotgun slaying of Dempsey Taylor, a wealthy farmer. The 1880 census shows fifty-year-old Dempsey Taylor, who was listed as “mulatto,” living in Mississippi County’s Monroe Township with his wife Melinda and five children. Henry Rose, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, lived in the same township with his grandparents, as did John Morrow, age twenty-five, a white farmer who lived with his wife and brother. A Tennessee newspaper described Taylor as “popular with his race, but…regarded as [an] impudent and overbearing person by his white neighbors.” On December 4, 1883, the Arkansas Gazette reported, Rose and Morrow argued with Taylor and “had trouble with …

Rose, Robert (Execution of)

Robert Rose died in the electric chair at Tucker Prison Farm on February 23, 1935, a mere fifty-one days following the murder of an Independence County sheriff’s deputy. Robert Rose, age twenty-seven, was born in the Arkansas Ozarks and had attended grammar school at Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) but later moved to Louisiana, where he stole a car in 1930 and was sentenced to five to eight years in prison. Despite two escapes from prison, he was paroled in 1934 and was back at his mother’s Pine Bluff home by Christmas. He soon embarked on a series of burglaries and robberies. On January 2, 1935, Rose and Woodrow Crump went to a gas station in Rosie (Independence County) and ordered …

Ruled by the Whip

Ruled by the Whip: Hell behind Bars in America’s Devil’s Island, the Arkansas Penitentiary is a 1958 self-published autobiographical account written by Dale Woodcock. One of the few printed accounts by an Arkansas prisoner, the book chronicles Woodcock’s experiences at Cummins prison farm in the 1950s. While the book garnered little attention when it was written, its tales of violence, corruption, and brutality corroborated abuses documented later during the governorship of Winthrop Rockefeller, who began work to reform the prisons. The author was born Charles Dale Woodcock on March 21, 1925, in Rogers (Benton County). He was the son of Henry Lee Woodcock (1900–1928) and Lillie Dell “Honey” Townsend Woodcock (1907–1988), both of whom were Arkansas natives. After the death …

Sarber, John Newton

John Newton Sarber was a Union soldier who remained in Arkansas after the Civil War and served in the state Senate, where he introduced a number of influential bills, including those creating the public school system and what is now the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). He also served as U.S. marshal of the U.S. Western District Court at Fort Smith (Sebastian County). Logan County was originally named Sarber County in his honor. John Newton Sarber was born on October 28, 1837, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Stephen and Lucille Sarber; he had one brother and two sisters. His mother died giving birth in 1849. The abolitionist family moved to Kansas Territory in 1855. Sarber and his father …

Schumann, Clarence (Trial and Execution of)

Clarence Schumann was the second of only two people legally executed in Garland County (Harry Poe, an African–American teenager, was the first). On July 11, 1912, Schumann, a white man, murdered his wife after she refused to grant him a divorce. At trial, Schumann’s lawyers argued that his addiction to morphine rendered him insane and that he should be spared the death penalty. On October 29, 1912, however, a Garland County jury found Schumann guilty and sentenced him to death. He was executed on June 2, 1913.   On July 11, 1912, Clarence Schumann came home from work to find his wife, Lula, gathering clothes in the backyard. He shot her twice with his pistol, killing her. Garland County authorities arrested him that evening. When questioned, Schumann explained that he was angry that his wife would not grant him …

Scott, George Washington

George Washington Scott was Arkansas Territory’s first U.S. marshal, serving from 1820 to 1831, as well as the state’s first auditor and the first clerk of the Territorial General Assembly. However, his volatile personality negated many of his early accomplishments, and he died a violent death in almost total obscurity. George Washington Scott was born in June 1798 in Virginia. He was one of six children of Andrew and Elizabeth Scott; his older brother, Andrew Horatio Scott, was later appointed as one of the first judges of the Arkansas Territory Superior Court. The family was living near St. Louis in the new Louisiana Territory as early as 1805. In 1808, they moved to Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. By 1815, they were …