Entries - Entry Category: Law - Starting with M

Madden, Owen Vincent

Owen Vincent “Owney” Madden was a gangster and underworld boss in New York City in the 1920s who retired to Hot Springs (Garland County) in the 1930s. Though his role in Arkansas politics and history will forever remain enigmatic, he was a powerful figure (from about 1935 until his death) during the heyday of illegal gambling in Hot Springs and an emblem of the bad old days of machine politics. Owney Madden was born on December 18, 1891, in Leeds, England, to Irish parents, Francis and Mary Madden. He spent his early childhood in Wigan and Liverpool, where Francis worked in textile mill sweatshops until his death in 1902. Mary then took her family, including Madden and perhaps two siblings, …

Magee, Leach (Lynching of)

On June 4, 1887, an African-American man named Leach Magee (sometimes referred to as Zach Magee) was hanged in Clarendon (Monroe County) for allegedly assaulting a woman named Mrs. J. M. Park, a relative of Sheriff J. W. B. Robinson. Neither Mrs. Park nor Leach Magee appear in any public records for Monroe County. In 1880, a single man named James W. B. Robinson, age twenty-four, was farming in Pine Ridge Township. County records indicate that he was sheriff in Monroe County from 1886 until 1890. He apparently later moved to El Paso, Texas, where he died in 1928. The first account of the alleged assault appeared in the Arkansas Gazette on June 3. It said that, on June 2, …

Maggio, Michael A.

Michael A. Maggio, a former Faulkner County circuit judge, was removed from office and later convicted in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas for accepting a bribe to reduce a nursing-home-negligence verdict and sentenced to ten years in federal prison. He was released in 2021. Michael Maggio was born in 1961, the oldest of four children of Henry Anthony Maggio, who was a psychiatrist and medical officer in the U.S. Army, and Bobby Padgett Maggio. Born in southern Louisiana, he spent his early childhood there and in Texas before the family settled in southern Mississippi after his father opened a psychiatry practice in Gulfport, Mississippi. Maggio graduated from St. Stanislaus High School in Bay St. …

Mahone, Hall (Execution of)

Hall (or Hal) Mahone was a young African American man hanged at Van Buren (Crawford County) on November 7, 1902, for rape. His was one of five public executions of rapists in the state between 1901 and 1904. Mrs. Rebecca McCloud, “a small woman, only 16 years old,” was staying with a Mrs. Clark at Haroldton (Crawford County) on September 5, 1902. She and ten-year-old Edgar Clark walked to the home of Dr. J. L. Young to get some medicine for Mrs. Clark’s sick infant. While they were heading home, Hall Mahone, “but 22 years of age and a giant physically,” allegedly came out of the undergrowth around the Bazort plantation just south of Van Buren and “dragged her into …

Maledon, George

While much of his life is shrouded in legend, according to a number of sources, George Maledon was the most prolific executioner in the United States in the last third of the nineteenth century. Working as the hangman for the famed Judge Isaac Parker for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), he reportedly performed as many as eighty-one executions, although more recent historical accounts put the number at closer to fifty. George Maledon was born in Germany on June 10, 1830. He immigrated with his parents, about whom little is known, to the United States, settling in the Detroit, Michigan, area, where they joined the small German Catholic community that had …

Malpass, Charles (Lynching of)

On September 27, 1911, a white man named Charles Malpass Sr. was lynched in Desha County following a shootout in which his sons murdered two police officers. According to newspaper accounts, Charles Malpass was a descendent of early French settlers at Arkansas Post. In 1850, the Malpass family was living in nearby Red Fork Township. Farmer Rubin Malpass was living with his wife, Rebecca, and five children, including four-year-old Charles. The family was still in the area in 1860, but by this time there were eight children, among them sixteen-year-old Charles. According to the Arkansas Gazette, Charles began living with a “mulatto” woman named Bettie West in 1868. West had resources of her own, having inherited several thousand dollars when …

Mankiller, Smoker (Execution of)

An eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Cherokee man named Smoker Mankiller was one of six prisoners executed at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on September 3, 1875. He was accused of shooting and then fatally stabbing a white man named William Short a year earlier. In a September 4, 1875, article, the Arkansas Gazette noted that Mankiller could both read and write in Cherokee and, employing stereotypes, described him as having the “usual Indian stoic indifference” of his tribe. On July 15, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat had given a fuller description, noting that Mankiller was “Medium-sized, full-faced, thick-lipped, [had] coarse hair of intense, dull blackness, face pock-marked and yellowish tinted, dark eyes and countenance apathetic and apparently listless.” At the time of his …

Manley Brothers (Execution of)

On September 9, 1881, Amos Manley and Abler Manley (sometimes referred to as Abner), eighteen- and twenty-year-old Creek brothers, were hanged in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of farmer Ellis McVay (sometimes identified as Eli McVay or Ellis McVeigh). The September 9, 1881, edition of the Arkansas Democrat gives an account of the crime, which it called “one of the bloodthirstiest pages in the criminal annals.” On December 3, 1880, the Manleys stopped at McVay’s farm near Eufala on the Choctaw/Creek border on their way to the Choctaw Nation. According to the Democrat, the Manleys were out hunting on the snow-covered prairie when they got lost. Hungry, cold, and exhausted, they came upon the cabin of a white …

Mansfield, William Walker

William Walker Mansfield was a lawyer, legislator, circuit judge, and associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. The Sebastian County town of Mansfield is believed to be named in his honor. William Walker Mansfield was born on January 16, 1830, in Scottsville, Kentucky, the son of Colonel George Washington Mansfield and Frances Cockrill Mansfield. Mansfield received a “common-school” education before studying law under Judge William V. Loving in Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Kentucky bar in 1852. A short time later, Mansfield corresponded with fellow Kentucky native and noted Arkansas politician and attorney David Walker in Fayetteville (Washington County) about possible opportunities in the legal field within the state. Despite Walker’s encouragement to consider a practice in …

Maples, Cheryl Kathleen Smith

Cheryl Maples was a prominent attorney in Little Rock (Pulaski County) and throughout the state. An outspoken champion of equal rights for all, she was particularly well known for her work on behalf of the LGBTQ+ community. Cheryl Kathleen Smith was born on March 2, 1950, in Santa Monica, California, to Harvey Smith and Patricia Ware Smith. She lived in Pacific Palisades until 1962, when her family moved to Arkansas, eventually settling in Fayetteville (Washington County). Smith graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1968 and married Richard Maples, a student at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville, that same day. The couple had two sons and three daughters. In 1980, at the age thirty, Cheryl Maples began college, studying …

Marion Lynching of 1910

On March 18, 1910, two African-American men, Robert (Bob) Austin and Charles Richardson, were lynched in Marion (Crittenden County) for allegedly assisting in a jailbreak. The victims were taken from jail by a mob and hanged in front of the Crittenden County Courthouse. There is very little known about the two victims. At the time of the 1900 census, Bob Austin was living in Jasper Township with his stepfather, Bennie Ross, and his mother, Henriette. Bennie was a farmer who was renting his farm, and nineteen-year-old Bob was a farm laborer. The men could neither read nor write, although Henriette could do both. Census records provide no information about Charles Richardson. According to the Arkansas Gazette, a jailbreak occurred on …

Marisa N. Pavan, et al. v. Nathaniel Smith

aka: Pavan v. Smith

Pavan v. Smith (2017) was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that clarified the legal parenting rights for the non-biological partner in a same-sex marriage. Rather than hearing oral arguments on the matter, the Court summarily rejected the decision of the Arkansas State Supreme Court denying a wife of a mother the opportunity to be listed as a parent on the couple’s child’s birth certificate, a privilege that was presumptively granted to husbands under Arkansas law. In 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws that barred same-sex marriage violated the Due Process and Equal Protections Clauses of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. Following that victory for marriage equality advocates, the Arkansas State Supreme Court acted …

Markle, John Lawrence

John Lawrence Markle was the perpetrator of a headline-grabbing crime in Little Rock (Pulaski County) in November 1987. The son of Academy Award–winning actress Mercedes McCambridge, Markle murdered his wife and two daughters before taking his own life on November 16, 1987. John Markle was born on December 25, 1941, in Hollywood, California, to Mercedes McCambridge and William Fifield. McCambridge was a radio actress who eventually moved into films, and Fifield was a writer. They divorced in 1946, and when McCambridge remarried in 1950, her second husband, film and television director Fletcher Markle, adopted the boy. John Markle was eight when his mother, who would become known to a later generation through her role as the voice of the demon …

Marmaduke-Walker Duel

aka: Walker-Marmaduke Duel

The Marmaduke-Walker Duel was fought during the Civil War between Confederate brigadier generals John Sappington Marmaduke and Lucius Marshall (Marsh) Walker. Marmaduke was originally from Missouri and was the son of a former governor. Walker was originally from Kentucky and nephew of President James K. Polk. Both graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They made their way to Arkansas during the war; Marmaduke was stationed there, while Walker was granted a transfer to Arkansas due to trouble with superiors. Disagreement arose between the two in the summer of 1863 over military actions at Helena (Phillips County) and Little Rock (Pulaski County), where Walker failed to carry out operations as planned and exposed Marmaduke and his men to enemy troops. …

Mays, Richard Leon

Richard Leon Mays was an early civil rights attorney during the struggles to integrate public facilities and end bias in Arkansas courts and law enforcement. He was in the first group of African Americans to be elected to the Arkansas General Assembly in the twentieth century and became the second African American to be a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Governor Bill Clinton appointed him to the court in 1979. He was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame in 2016. Richard L. Mays was born on August 5, 1943, in Little Rock (Pulaski County), the younger of two sons of Barnett G. Mays and Dorothy Mae Greenlee Mays. Although the family lived in an integrated neighborhood on …

McBroom, Alexander (Execution of)

Alexander D. McBroom was a young Union infantryman who was executed by a firing squad at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) on April 21, 1865, for desertion and larceny. Alexander D. McBroom, thirty-four, a native of Cannon County, Tennessee, enlisted in Company B, First Arkansas Infantry Regiment (US) at Fayetteville (Washington County) on February 4, 1863. He was reported to be five feet eight inches tall and had dark hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. A farmer, he had a wife and two children. He was listed as absent without leave on February 25, 1863, and deemed a deserter that summer. Confederate service records indicate that he joined Company B of Crawford’s Cavalry Battalion on March 2, 1863. He returned …

McClain, Doc (Lynching of)

Doc McClain (whose name is sometimes rendered Dock McLain or McLane) was lynched in Ashdown (Little River County) on May 13, 1910, for allegedly stabbing wealthy young farmer Ernest Hale. According to the 1900 census, farmer Doc McClain (whose age was not given) was living in a rented home in Franklin (Little River County) with his wife Mary (aged thirty) and their two children, Lizzie (seven) and Ezekil (three). They had been married for ten years. Neither Doc nor Mary could read or write. According to numerous accounts, Doc McClain stabbed Ernest Hale in a store sometime in April 1910. Hale survived the attack and was hospitalized. At the time, it was feared that he would die. Local citizens threatened …

McClure, John “Poker Jack”

John McClure was an Ohio-born lawyer who came to Arkansas as the Civil War was ending and played a starring role in the political tumult that followed. Often ridiculed as “Poker Jack” owing to his fondness for gambling (he had been expelled from the Union army for playing poker), McClure was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court during the latter years of Reconstruction. Democrats and a Republican faction accused him of malfeasance during the Brooks-Baxter War and its aftermath, and the Arkansas House of Representatives impeached him. The Arkansas Senate refused to convict and remove him from office and instead awarded him $2,000 for the trouble that the impeachment had caused him. When federal Reconstruction ended and conservative Democrats …

McCollum, Ed (Lynching of)

Early in the morning of October 4, 1903, an African American man named Ed McCollum was lynched in Sheridan (Grant County) for having allegedly assaulted a police officer. According to an early report in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic, around 11:00 p.m. on the night of Friday, October 2, 1903, Constable Ed M. Crutchfield “attempted to arrest McCollum on a warrant charging McCollum with having assaulted another negro.” McCollum resisted arrest and shot Crutchfield in the arm. He was arrested the following morning and put in the jail at Sheridan. Around midnight, “a mob of 15 to 25 strong broke open the jail, took McCollum out, tied him to a tree nearby and riddled his body with bullets.” In keeping …

McCool, John Thurman (Murder of)

John Thurman McCool, a prominent businessman of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), was rebuilding his life after serving a prison sentence for forging state treasury warrants when he was shot to death outside Sheridan (Grant County) in 1962. McCool’s murder remains unsolved. The mystery surrounding the killing and the strange circumstances of his life in the six years prior to it made the murder a subject of rumors of a mob killing, of revenge, and of silencing a man who knew too much, although no evidence of any of those motives ever emerged. Thurman McCool was born in Sheridan on August 18, 1913. He grew up in Pine Bluff, married a Pine Bluff woman, and was prominent in the business and …

McCoy, Hosey (Lynching of)

On March 9, 1902, an African American man named Hosey McCoy was lynched in Little River County for allegedly having raped a white woman. A relatively detailed account of the event was published in the March 13, 1902, edition of the Fort Smith Times. This account relied upon “authentic advices” received at Texarkana (Miller County) from New Rocky Comfort—now Foreman (Little River County)—on the morning of March 10 and later transmitted onward. According to this account, the woman “criminally assaulted” was one “Mrs. John Lemon, a white woman and wife of a drummer.” This was perhaps Dora Lemons, age twenty-two, who is listed in the 1900 census as the wife of a John Lemons of Little River County, age twenty-nine, …

McCulloch, Edgar Allen

Edgar Allen McCulloch was a lawyer in eastern Arkansas who achieved renown in a long career that included twenty-four years as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, nineteen of them as chief justice, and a critical span of six years as chairman or member of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), where he established important law in the regulation of public utilities in the United States. At the FTC, he personally took on an extensive investigation of public-utility holding companies in America requested by Congress, which resulted in a raft of energy regulation laws during the New Deal. Edgar McCulloch was born in Trenton, Tennessee, on August 1, 1861, to Dr. Phillip Doddridge McCulloch and Lucy Virginia Burrus McCulloch. McCulloch’s …

McCurtain, Amos (Execution of)

Amos McCurtain was a Choctaw man hanged at Van Buren (Crawford County) on June 24, 1870, for a double murder in what would be the first public execution in Crawford County since the end of the Civil War. Amos McCurtain and William Fry, another Choctaw man, were traveling by wagon between Scullyville and Boggy Depot in the Indian Territory on September 7, 1869, when they encountered a wagon driven by James McClain, who was Choctaw, and James Blakely, a Black man. McCurtain and Fry stopped to camp for the night, and the other two men stopped and camped near them. As McClain and Blakely slept, McCurtain proposed killing the pair and stealing the goods from their wagon. Fry opposed the …

McDonald (Lynching of)

A pair of Marion County men were shot as suspected horse thieves on Christmas Day of 1870 by a trio of vigilantes from Springfield, Missouri. A man named McDonald was killed in the incident. According to a short article in the January 25, 1871, Arkansas Gazette, three men from Springfield “named Patterson, and Dodson, and a third, name unknown,” rode into Marion County in pursuit of a stolen horse. Once in the county, they apprehended a man named Otterbury, and while one vigilante guarded him, the other two detained a man named McDonald “whom they also accused as being one of their thieves.” After “some altercation,” the Missourians shot the two men after Otterbury “attempted to resist.” McDonald died of …

McDonald, Maurice Neal “Nick”

Maurice Neal “Nick” McDonald was a patrolman for the Dallas Police Department who achieved international renown for arresting Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after the murder of John F. Kennedy. Nick McDonald was born on March 21, 1928, in Camden (Ouachita County), the second of three sons born to Beulah Lee Womack McDonald and Thomas “Bid” McDonald, a laborer in the southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana oil industry. After McDonald’s younger brother died, his parents divorced, and his mother moved to Maine; McDonald remained in Arkansas with his grandparents, Charles Womack, a local businessman, and his wife, Laura. While attending Camden High School, McDonald was given the moniker “Nick,” and, with his grandmother’s reluctant permission, he joined the U.S. Navy at …

McFaddin, Edward Fitzgerald (Ed)

Edward Fitzgerald McFaddin was a lawyer who for twenty-four years was a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, where he always anchored the conservative wing. After retiring from the court, McFaddin led the opposition to the proposed constitution of 1970, a set of constitutional reforms that voters defeated in the general election that year. He challenged nearly all the changes proposed in the new charter, claiming that it would raise taxes, increase government, and do away with sacred customs. Both of the candidates for governor in that election, Winthrop Rockefeller and Dale Bumpers, had urged voters to ratify it, to no avail. Ed McFaddin was born on December 30, 1894, in Hope (Hempstead County), the son of Edward McFaddin and …

McGehee Lynching of 1894

On September 22, 1894, Luke Washington, Richard Washington, and Henry C. Robinson were lynched in McGehee (Desha County) for allegedly murdering local merchant H. C. Patton and robbing his store. One of the interesting aspects of this case is that the African-American population of McGehee (then known as McGehee Junction) reportedly took an active part in the three men’s lynching. On September 20, 1894, Patton locked his store, which was located on the edge of a cotton field some distance from the depot in McGehee, and proceeded along the walkway to his bedroom. There, Robinson and the two Washingtons allegedly killed him with a club. Although Patton was armed with a pistol, he was unable to use it in time. His attackers then …

McHaney, Edgar Lafayette

Edgar McHaney contributed to legal proceedings that changed constitutional law in the United States. With co-counsel Scipio Africanus Jones, he appealed the convictions of twelve men convicted of murder after the 1919 Elaine Massacre. The case of six of the men, Moore v. Dempsey, was eventually heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, and a precedent-setting decision allowed federal courts to override state appellate courts if constitutional rights were denied. McHaney also served for a short time in the Arkansas House of Representatives before a long tenure on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Born on November 6, 1876, in Gibson, Tennessee, Edgar Lafayette McHaney was one of nine children of William W. McHaney and Mary Ellen Hicks McHaney. He grew up on …

McHaney, James Monroe

James Monroe McHaney, a Little Rock (Pulaski County) native who graduated from law school in 1942, was recruited in 1946 to participate in the trials of German Nazi war criminals after World War II. In his obituary in the New York Times in 1995, he was lauded for his success as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. James McHaney was born on April 23, 1918, one of the six children of Edgar L. McHaney, who was later an Arkansas Supreme Court justice, and Gail Myers McHaney. After receiving both a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from Columbia University, he joined a New York law firm. (This was during World War II, but he was determined physically unqualified for military …

McIntyre, Samuel (Lynching of)

On April 23, 1919, an African-American man named Sam McIntyre was hanged near Forrest City (St. Francis County) for allegedly murdering another black man, John Johnson, the previous February. According to the February 10, 1919, edition of the Arkansas Gazette, on February 6, Johnson was shot through the window while playing checkers with a friend at his home on the Graham farm. McIntyre was arrested after the killing, along with U. L. “Hub” Lancaster (a white man) and Rube McGee (a black man). According to the report, “Johnson was a witness against Lancaster and McIntyre in several liquor cases, one case of assault to kill and another case charging burglary and grand larceny.” He was to testify when the case …

McKee, William (Execution of)

William F. McKee was executed on May 26, 1837, for the murder of his brother’s brother-in-law, though he continually proclaimed his innocence, blaming his brother for the crime. Buford P. Scott was shot in the back on December 24, 1836, near his father’s home about twelve miles from Little Rock (Pulaski County), the fatal bullet entering his back to the left of his spinal column and exiting his chest. Two brothers, William and Alexander McKee, were arrested the next day and charged with Scott’s murder. At their trial on April 13, 1837, a parade of witnesses testified that William McKee had a history of conflict with Scott, whose sister Catherine was married to Alexander McKee, with several recounting threats William McKee …

McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education

The 1981–82 federal court case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education constituted a challenge to the state’s Act 590, which mandated the equal treatment of creation science in classrooms where evolution was taught. On January 5, 1982, U.S. District Court Judge William R. Overton ruled Act 590 unconstitutional in light of the establishment clause of the First Amendment. His determination that creationism constituted a religious doctrine rather than a scientific theory had a profound impact on the nation, the ramifications of which are still being felt today. The draft of the model act which eventually became Act 590 originated in an Anderson, South Carolina, organization called Citizens for Fairness in Education. Its founder, Paul Ellwanger, working from a model prepared …

McLendon, Will (Reported Lynching of)

In many cases, newspapers across the country published reports on lynchings, which were then listed in books and other resources. In some cases, even though subsequent reports indicated that the lynching had not happened, initial accounts were not corrected. Such was the case with an African American man, Will McLendon of Woodruff County, who was reportedly lynched in August 1893. In his 1993 dissertation, citing an August 6 report in the Memphis Appeal Avalanche, historian Richard Buckelew commented on this presumed lynching, which he dated at August 5. In her 1894 book A Red Record, Ida Wells Barnett gave the date of the lynching as August 9. It seems, however, that McLendon actually died in jail in Newport (Jackson County) …

McMath, Phillip Hal

Phillip Hal McMath is a Little Rock (Pulaski County) trial attorney, an award-winning writer, a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran, and an ardent advocate for preserving and promoting Arkansas literature and history. McMath has published four novels and numerous short stories and articles, along with producing two plays. His book Lost Kingdoms was the winner of the Arkansiana Fiction Award in 2009, while The Broken Vase received the Booker Worthen Prize in 2011 . McMath established the Porter Prize in 1984, which has made a significant contribution to literature in Arkansas. Phillip McMath was born in Memphis, Tennessee, to Sidney Sanders McMath and Anne Phillips McMath on December 25, 1945; he has two brothers and two sisters. In 1948, McMath’s father was elected …

McMath, Sid

aka: Sidney Sanders McMath

Sidney Sanders McMath—who became a prosecuting attorney, decorated U.S. Marine officer, and governor—rose to national attention by prosecuting Hot Springs (Garland County) mayor Leo McLaughlin, and he used that exposure to launch a campaign for governor. He was a close political friend to President Harry Truman and a dedicated foe to the Dixiecrat movement that tried to control the Democratic Party in the South in the 1948 presidential campaign. Sid McMath was born on June 14, 1912, to Hal Pierce McMath and Nettie Belle Sanders McMath in Columbia County. McMath’s father inherited the family farm when his father, the county sheriff, died in a shootout with bootleggers. McMath’s father had a restless spirit and gave up the farm before McMath was …

McNeil, Sharpe (Lynching of)

According to the Arkansas Gazette’s coverage of the affair, on the night of January 18, 1881, a mob of about 100 men assembled at the jail in Star City (Lincoln County) for the purposes of lynching a white man named Sharpe McNeil, who had been charged with the murder of Dr. E. U. G. Anderson. The mob “surprised the jailor, put him under arrest, and proceeded to the jail, where they forced open the doors and took out the man.” The mob took McNeil “to the outskirts of the town, where he was found riddled with bullets.” The brief report in the January 20, 1881, Gazette ends by noting: “The people of Star City are much excited over the affair.” …

McWhorter, Dave (Execution of)

Dave McWhorter was hanged on July 25, 1902, for murdering his wife. His was the second of three executions conducted at Van Buren (Crawford County) in 1902 and one of six on the same date in Arkansas. Dave McWhorter (called Thomas in some news reports), described as a “remarkably well preserved man of 59 years old,” had been wed to his wife Mary for about a year when they quarreled and he left her. On November 15, 1901, he went to her home near Mulberry (Crawford County) and asked her to take him back, but she “said she was done with him.” She and her two children headed to the fields to pick cotton as McWhorter continued to plead with …

Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice is professional misconduct by physicians and surgeons toward a patient. Historically, malpractice falls into two categories: criminal malpractice covers actions contrary to or expressively forbidden by law; civil malpractice, the dominant form in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, refers to injurious treatment of the patient that includes unnecessary suffering or death that is due to professional ignorance, carelessness, a want of proper medical skills, and a disregard for established rules and practices. More rarely, malpractice can cover lawyers and other professionals. Medical malpractice suits emerged in the nineteenth century and came about only after the practice of medicine became informed by a scientific revolution that involved such discoveries as sepsis, immunization, and the germ theory. Suits were rare …

Mehaffy, James William

James W. Mehaffy was a member of a distinguished family of lawyers and jurists. He was elected justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court but died in a car wreck weeks before he was to be sworn in. His father and law partner in Little Rock (Pulaski County) was appointed to fill his seat on the Supreme Court and then was elected to the court and served for sixteen years. James Mehaffy was the first in the family to be elected a judge, but others in the family followed him into the state and federal judiciary for the rest of the twentieth century. Born on December 24, 1886, in Saline County, James William Mehaffy was the eldest of four sons and …

Mehaffy, Thomas Miller (Tom)

Tom Mehaffy was a self-educated schoolteacher, lawyer, and politician whose life at the age of sixty-seven was transformed by family tragedy into a distinguished career on the Arkansas Supreme Court. After fifteen years on the court during the Great Depression and the early stages of World War II, the aged and ailing justice retired in 1942, having earned the sobriquet “the Chief Dissenter” for his frequent disagreements with the other justices over the value that should be given to precedents. Mehaffy also founded what became Arkansas’s largest law firm, known in the twenty-first century as the Friday Law Firm in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Thomas Miller Mehaffy was born on October 3, 1859, in Ripley, Mississippi, to Thomas Langley Mehaffy …

Mercer, William (Lynching of)

William Mercer was apparently shot to death in 1898 by a Cleburne County lynch mob that found him after weeks of searching as he hid in the mountains after murdering his daughter. William Mercer (called Messer in some articles) was accused by his daughter of having committed “a revolting crime,” and in February 1898, she “mysteriously disappeared.” A local judge issued a warrant for his arrest, but he had already fled when lawmen went to serve the warrant on March 8, 1898. Few details are available outside of what appeared in short newspaper articles that appeared around the country. Those articles, datelined Little Rock (Pulaski County) on April 3, 1898, indicate that Mercer killed his daughter earlier in the year. …

Miller, James Brown (Jim)

James Brown (Jim) Miller was an Arkansas native but spent much of his life in Texas and Oklahoma, where he earned the reputation of a professional assassin, manipulating the court system to avoid prison. From his early years in Van Buren (Crawford County) to his death in Ada, Oklahoma, Miller proved to be a man to be feared. Jim Miller, the eighth of nine children of Jacob and Cynthia Miller, was born near Van Buren on October 25, 1861. His father was a miller and, at times, a stone mason by trade. Miller received the typical education of the times, and nothing stands out in his life until the family relocated to Coryell County, Texas. The exact year of this …

Miller, John Elvis

John Elvis Miller, the son of a Confederate veteran, had a distinguished career in the law, sandwiched around a political career that took him to the U.S. Senate in one of the most startling Arkansas elections of the twentieth century. He was a prosecuting attorney, a congressman, and a senator, resigning the last position in 1941 when President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him U.S. judge for the Western District of Arkansas. John E. Miller was born on May 15, 1888, in Stoddard County, Missouri, the son of John A. and Mary Harper Miller. As a child, he helped his parents and seven siblings raise cotton and corn on their Missouri bootheel farm. When he finished the ninth grade, he took an …

Mills, Lee (Execution of)

aka:

Lee Mills was hanged at Heber Springs (Cleburne County) on September 16, 1898, for a murder and robbery in Van Buren County. His accomplice, Will H. Hardin, was murdered in his jail cell in Clinton (Van Buren County) on April 17, 1899. Mills and Hardin—the latter a former deputy sheriff—both of whom lived near Scotland (Van Buren County), rode to the home of Hugh Patterson on Culpepper Mountain about six miles southwest of Clinton on the evening of December 13, 1897, intending to rob him of between $1,000 and $1,800 believed to be in his house. Patterson’s son Jim, Jim’s wife Rebecca and their five children, and Patterson’s brother William James Patterson were also at the house when the robbers …

Millwee, Minor Wallace

Minor Wallace Millwee was a distinguished justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court who was the first political victim of the surge of racism that followed the showdown over school desegregation at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. After Governor Orval E. Faubus dispatched National Guardsmen to stop nine Black students from entering the high school, and President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized the guard and sent federal troops to protect the Black students in school, former state senator James D. Johnson, Arkansas’s most determined segregationist, ran against Justice Millwee in 1958, calling him “a pawn of integration,” although the judge had never expressed an opinion publicly about the issue. Johnson posited that his own election, rather than Millwee’s, would show the …

Mississippi County Executions of 1880

A pair of African American men were hanged for the crime of murder at Osceola (Mississippi County) on July 9, 1880, in the first legal public execution in Mississippi County. Armstead Penn of Memphis, Tennessee, was picking cotton in Mississippi County in late 1879 when he befriended George Sanford and Richard McKee, two local Black men. On November 26, 1879, they murdered Penn, “falling upon their victim in a lonely and unfrequented place.” They first shot him in the back, then smashed his skull with a club and “finished and made certain the devilish deed by cutting his throat.” The two men stole about forty dollars from their victim. Penn’s body was found in a wooded area ten or twelve …

Mississippi River Lynching of 1841

In August 1841, a number of suspected counterfeiters were reportedly rounded up along the Mississippi River and drowned by a group of Arkansas vigilantes. The first report of the event places the number killed at twenty-three, while noting that the vigilantes were continuing to target people. Subsequent reports place the number “either drowned or shot” as high as seventy-five. The first report of this affair appears in the August 15, 841, Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Louisiana, which cites as the source an unnamed person “who arrived in the city yesterday from Arkansas.” According to this person’s account, the violence occurred between August 5 and 10 in both southern Phillips County, some forty miles below Helena (Phillips County), and Coahoma County, …

Mitchell v. Globe International Publishing

aka: People's Bank and Trust Company of Mountain Home v. Globe International Publishing

Mitchell v. Globe International Publishing, Inc. 978 F. 2nd 1065 was a legal case involving First Amendment freedom of the press, as well as privacy issues. It originated in a lawsuit filed by ninety-six-year-old Nellie Mitchell, a native of Mountain Home (Baxter County). Mitchell sued Globe International, the publisher of the tabloid paper the Sun, for false light invasion of privacy after the paper published a photograph of her to illustrate one of its articles. When the jury returned a verdict in favor of Mitchell and awarded her a total of $1.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, Globe appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which upheld the verdict. A final effort to appeal to …

Mitchell v. United States

Mitchell v. United States et al., 313 U.S. 80 (1941), came on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, challenging discriminatory treatment of railroad accommodations for African-American passengers on interstate train coaches passing through Arkansas, where a state law demanded segregation of races but equivalent facilities. The Supreme Court had held in earlier cases that it was adequate under the Fourteenth Amendment for separate privileges to be supplied to differing groups of people as long as they were treated similarly well. Originating in Arkansas in April 1937, the suit worked its way through the regulatory and legal system, finally ending up on the calendar of the Supreme Court in 1941. The circumstances surrounding the matter began after the only African American …

Mitchell, Charles (Lynching of)

On November 2, 1884, Charles Mitchell was murdered near Richmond (Little River County) for the alleged murder of a prominent farmer’s wife, Kate Waddell. The incident made news not only in Arkansas, but also in Texas, the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), and Michigan. At the time of the 1880 census, forty-year-old Charley Mitchell—an African-American or biracial man—was living in Johnson Township of Little River County with his wife, Isabella, and their two sons, William (thirteen) and Mitchel (eleven). The census lists no occupation for Mitchell, but his two sons were working as servants. According to an October 31 article in the Arkansas Gazette, Mrs. Waddell, “an estimable woman,” was murdered on October 29 “by a notorious negro by the name …