Entries - Entry Category: Law - Starting with P

Pace, William Fletcher

William Fletcher (W. F.) Pace was an officer in the Civil War, Boone County Clerk, and a prominent attorney in Harrison (Boone County) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. W. F. Pace was born on July 1, 1840, in Temple, Texas, to William Pace and Hester Armitage Pace. After his father died, Pace moved to Missouri with his mother when he was around age two. He grew up in Dent County, Missouri. Pace was a Confederate in the Civil War. He began service in Dent County, Missouri, as a first lieutenant in Henry Pace’s Company, Fourth Cavalry Regiment, Seventh Division, Missouri State Guard. Henry Pace was Pace’s older brother. On June 14, 1861, Pace enlisted in Company A, First …

Paragould Race Riots

Paragould (Greene County), which incorporated in 1883, experienced a series of incidents of racial violence and intimidation from 1888 to 1908. (In this context, a race riot is defined as any prolonged form of mob-related civil disorder in which race plays a key role.) The outmigration of African Americans that followed these various incidents helped to cement its reputation as a “sundown town.” On April 21, 1888, the Arkansas Gazette published a letter sent by a member of the black community and addressed to the country’s first elected African-American municipal judge, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs. The writer sought Gibbs’s help, telling him that “I am disgusted the way I am served, and also my friends. We are but a few colored …

Parchmeal, William (Execution of)

On June 26, 1885, a Cherokee man named William Parchmeal was hanged at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of a man named Henry Fiegel (also reported as Feigel, Figel, and Figet). The case has received a lot of mention over the years because Parchmeal’s co-defendant, James Arcene, was reportedly only around ten years old when the crime was committed, making him the youngest juvenile offender in the federal court system to receive the death sentence. Little is known about any of the people named above. Civil War records, however, do list a William Parchmeal who enlisted as a private in Company C of the Second Indian Home Guards, Kansas Infantry (Union). The records provide no additional information about …

Parker, Isaac Charles

Isaac Charles Parker served as federal judge for the Federal Court of the Western District of Arkansas in Fort Smith (Sebastian County). He tried 13,490 cases, with 9,454 of them resulting in guilty pleas or convictions. His court was unique in the fact that he had jurisdiction over all of Indian Territory, covering over 74,000 square miles. He sentenced 160 people to death, including four women. Of those sentenced to death under Parker, seventy-nine men were executed on the gallows. Born on October 15, 1838, in Barnesville, Ohio, Isaac Parker was the son of Joseph and Jane Parker. Joseph was a farmer, and Jane was known for her strong mental qualities and business habits. She was active in the Methodist …

Parker, Tom (Reported Lynching of)

On October 14, 1897, an African American man named Tom Parker was reportedly lynched in Cleveland County for participating in a riot at an August picnic near Kendall’s mill. While many newspapers refer to Parker as the third person to have been lynched after the incident, the only other reported lynching as a result of the incident was that of Bill Wiley (also referred to as Bill Wiley Douglass and Bill Wyatt), who was lynched in late August. Newspapers ultimately concluded that Parker had not been lynched. The earliest report of the Kendall incident appears in the Pine Bluff Daily Graphic on August 22. On Saturday, August 21, a group of African Americans had a picnic near the Kendall mill …

Paschal, George W.

George W. Paschal was a Georgia-born lawyer and politician who had an unusually restless and wayfaring career, including a spell in 1843 as one of the four earliest justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court. His sojourn in Arkansas, with his Cherokee wife, lasted only about ten years. Like quite a few Southerners of his time, Paschal defended slavery for practical and not philosophical reasons but also championed the Union, which made him sometimes the arch enemy of both sides. He was jailed in the Confederate state of Texas and was threatened by a mob of Union haters. He publicly attacked his boss, the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, for his ruling on the validity of secession from the …

Patrick, William (Lynching of)

On December 3, 1915, an African-American man named William Patrick was lynched in St. Francis County for allegedly killing a young white man named Bard Nichols in October of that year. There is very little information available about William Patrick. In 1900, there was an eighteen-year-old African American by that name boarding in Franks Township in St. Francis County and working on a farm. He could both read and write. In 1910, there was an African American named W. D. Patrick living in Franks Township; his age is listed as thirty-six at the time, making him a slightly more likely candidate. He was a farmer living with his wife and four small children. If Patrick was fifty-five years old as …

Patterson, Franklin (Execution of)

Franklin Patterson was a Missouri native and discharged Union soldier who was hanged on May 5, 1865, at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) for the murder of a wealthy civilian. The 1860 federal census lists Frank Marzall, age forty-eight, as a native of Switzerland who lived in Van Buren (Crawford County); the farmer owned $600 in real and $2,630 in personal property. In 1865, he was murdered by Franklin Patterson, who the Fort Smith New Era described as “about 34 years old, of profane and intemperate habits, living in the exulting ecstacies [sic] of passionate indulgences, rather than in the clearer, steadier lights of dispassionate reason.” The newspaper said the Fayette County, Missouri, native had been discharged from the First Missouri …

Paul Ruiz and Earl Van Denton (Crime Spree)

Paul Ruiz and Earl Van Denton escaped from an Oklahoma prison and embarked on a crime spree that took them across multiple states, including Arkansas. The men were convicted in Arkansas of killing town marshal Marvin Ritchie and park ranger Opal James in Logan County. They were executed along with a third man at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction on January 8, 1997. At the time of their escape, Ruiz was serving a life sentence for armed robbery, while Van Denton was serving a life sentence for murder. Working as part of a twenty-member crew tasked with tearing down a brick factory near the prison in McAlester, Oklahoma, the pair escaped on June 23, 1977. They …

Pegues, Chris (Execution of)

Chris Pegues was an African American man executed at Augusta (Woodruff County) on October 9, 1885, for the murder of his “paramour.” Pegues was convicted of first-degree murder in Woodruff County on August 28, 1885, for killing Mollie Banks in late December 1884. Some 3,000 people gathered at Augusta on the day of his execution and speaking “in an intelligent, calm way,” Pegues told the crowd of his stormy relationship with Banks. They met in Lake County, Mississippi, in 1883. Banks was separated from her husband, and after she and Pegues became involved, they moved to Arkansas, where they intended for her to get a divorce in February 1885 so that they could get married. Acquaintances in Arkansas, however, tried …

Penal Systems

aka: Prisons

The penal system of Arkansas has been fraught with controversy through the years. It has been central to the careers of some of the state’s governors and has more than once drawn national and international attention for its faults and shortcomings. Beginnings Many of the Europeans who settled in the United States believed that the chief purpose of government was to punish sinners while leaving the righteous alone. As a result, many of the early actions of colonial and territorial Arkansas pertained to crime and punishment (as was the case across North America). Arkansas Post was a colonial settlement of the French and Spanish (mostly the French) during the seventeenth century; a prison was one of the first structures to …

Peonage

The term “peonage” refers to a debt labor system whereby workers are tied to a landowner due to debts owed the landowner by the worker. Peonage is considered a form of slavery since the worker is essentially prohibited from leaving the control of the landowner. Peonage was declared illegal by Congress in 1867, and two of the most famous peonage investigations occurred in Arkansas during the first decades of the twentieth century. Potential for peonage came about following the Civil War when the South’s agricultural economy shifted from use of a slavery-based workforce to a farming environment that relied on a mixture of hired labor and tenant farming or sharecropping. The sharecropping system encouraged indebtedness to the landowner since supplies …

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 …

Pfeifer v. City of Little Rock

Pfeifer v. City of Little Rock was a lawsuit filed in 1999 by Eugene Pfeifer III that, had it been successful, would have upended all the developing plans for the presidential library of President Bill Clinton. The suit stemmed from a dispute and the resulting failed negotiations surrounding the effort to plan and eventually construct a presidential library in Little Rock (Pulaski County) following Clinton’s election in 1992. Not long after Clinton’s election to the presidency, a group of his supporters established the Clinton Presidential Library Study Commission and began to look for a suitable place in Arkansas to establish the former Arkansas governor’s presidential library. The creation of the commission set in motion a lengthy process that had lawyers …

Phillips County Lynching of 1859

Historians of racial violence long contended that those held in slavery were not often lynched due to the value tied to their living bodies. However, greater inquiry into the matter has revealed a greater number of slave lynchings than previously thought. One such event occurred on August 17, 1859, near Helena (Phillips County). The event in question is so far known from a single article in the August 24, 1859, Des Arc Citizen newspaper published in Des Arc (Prairie County). According to this report, which draws upon information from the Southron newspaper of Helena, on August 11, “a negro man, belong to J. W. Carpenter, Esq., near Helena, struck Mr. Robert Bickers (Mr. Carpenter’s overseer) on the head, with an …

Phillips County Lynching of 1889–1890

On December 30–31, 1889, and January 1, 1890, three unidentified African Americans were killed in Phillips County for allegedly robbing and murdering John W. Tate. The lynching victims were not identified by name in any source. In 1880, John W. Tate, a twenty-eight-year-old white farmer, was living alone in Poplar Grove (Phillips County). According to a January 1, 1890, report in the Arkansas Gazette, sometime in the 1880s he was dealing in illegal whiskey, and there were seven indictments pending against him in Phillips County. Just prior to his death, he was running a “blind tiger” (speakeasy) at Palmerton in neighboring Monroe County. Although the Gazette reported that the crime took place on Sunday night, December 29, 1889, other reports, …

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 …

Phillips, et al. v. Weeks, et al.

Phillips, et al. v. Weeks, et al. was a sweeping lawsuit in federal district court at Little Rock (Pulaski County) alleging that the municipal police engaged in systematic discrimination against African Americans, including illegal detention, physical brutality, verbal abuse, and segregation in jail. The class-action suit was filed in January 1972, and the trial lasted two and a half months in 1974–1975. The case languished in the court for another eight years before all the issues were finally settled, with only a partial victory for the class of people for whom the suit was filed. U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Eisele eventually ordered an end to jail segregation and to the illegal detention of blacks, an infamous system in which …

Phillips, Henry (Lynching of)

On November 13, 1897, Henry Phillips was lynched in Osceola (Mississippi County) for the alleged murder of storekeeper Tom McClanahan. Editor Leon Roussan’s coverage of the incident in the Osceola Times sparked a feud with Sheriff Charles Bowen. Bowen, a former captain in the Confederate army and a local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, was prominently involved in the Black Hawk War of 1872. According to the Osceola Times, on November 6, Tom McClanahan was brutally murdered in his store. McClanahan had come from Tennessee three years earlier to work in a local sawmill. When the mill was sold, he remained in Mississippi County to settle up outstanding claims. At the same time, he operated a small grocery store in …

Piazza, Chris

Chris Piazza was a judge in Little Rock (Pulaski County) for thirty years, capping a public service career that also included thirteen years as a prosecutor before he was first elected a Pulaski County circuit judge. Over the course of his years on the bench, he presided over a wide range of cases and was hailed by some and reviled by others for his pioneering decision ruling the state’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Christopher Charles Piazza was born on March 3, 1947, to Sam Piazza, who was the oldest child of an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Little Rock in 1903, and Francis Jordan Piazza, a native of Plymouth, England, whom Sam had met while serving in World War …

Pickett, Alexander Corbin (A. C.)

Known personally and professionally as A. C. Pickett or Colonel Pickett, Alexander Corbin Pickett was a lawyer in Jacksonport (Jackson County) and later Augusta (Woodruff County), organizer of the Jackson Guards (CS) in the Civil War, and later a colonel in the Tenth Missouri Infantry (CS). Following the war, Pickett was head of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in Woodruff County during Reconstruction. A. C. Pickett, whose birth date is unknown (sources range from 1820 to 1823), was the sixth of the nine children of Steptoe Pickett and Sarah Chilton Pickett who survived into adulthood. Originally from Warrenton in Fauquier County, Virginia, the Picketts came to Mooresville, Alabama, around 1820, just as the area was opening to settlement. Pickett and …

Pike-Roane Duel

aka: Roane-Pike Duel

The Pike-Roane Duel was fought in 1847 between Albert Pike and John Selden Roane. Albert Pike was originally a Bostonian who left the Northeast to explore the West and eventually ended up in Arkansas on an expedition. He decided to stay, practicing law and becoming a prominent Arkansan. John Selden Roane, born in Tennessee, moved to Arkansas to study law and eventually was elected governor. Both Pike and Roane fought in the Mexican War in the 1840s. Pike was so disappointed with the Arkansas regiment’s performance in the Battle of Buena Vista (including events leading to the battlefield death of former Arkansas governor and congressman Archibald Yell) that he wrote a letter on March 8, 1847, to the editor of …

Pike, Albert

Albert Pike was a lawyer who played a major role in the development of the early courts of Arkansas and played an active role in the state’s politics prior to the Civil War. He also was a central figure in the development of Masonry in the state and later became a national leader of that organization. During the Civil War, he commanded the Confederacy’s Indian Territory, raising troops there and exercising field command in one battle. He also was a talented poet and writer. Albert Pike was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on December 29, 1809. He was one of the six children of Benjamin Pike, a cobbler, and Sarah Andrews. He attended public schools in Byfield, Newburyport, and Framingham, Massachusetts. …

Pine Bluff Lynchings of 1892

On February 14, 1892, John Kelley (sometimes spelled Kelly) was lynched in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) for the murder of W. T. McAdams. At the time, Pine Bluff was the second-largest city in Arkansas. The black population in Jefferson County was seventy-three percent, and there were a number of prominent African-American landowners and merchants. The city boasted a black newspaper, as well as the state’s only college for African Americans, Branch Normal School (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff). According to the Arkansas Gazette, on the night of February 9, John Kelley and several accomplices allegedly murdered W. T. McAdams, an agent for the Obest Brewing Company and a highly respected Pine Bluff citizen. At 10:30 p.m., McAdams …

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 …

Plumerville Conflict of 1886–1892

During the late 1880s, electoral politics in Conway County turned violent, resulting in serious injuries and several deaths. In the Plumerville (Conway County) community, actions such as voter intimidation and the theft of ballot boxes were flagrant and seemingly condoned by public officials. The violence became widely known and was the subject of a federal investigation after the assassination of a congressional candidate, John Clayton. A pattern of local political affiliations and latent hostilities toward other factions developed and remained well into the twentieth century. While the political conflict renewed itself after the 1884 election, the underlying causes date back to the pre–Civil War days. Conway County was a small version of Arkansas in terms of geographic culture and economics. …

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 …

Polk Brothers (Lynching of)

On September 6, 1885, two white men popularly dubbed the “Polk boys”—brothers Henry and Sylvester Polk—were burned alive in the city jail at Murfreesboro (Pike County) after two previous unsuccessful attempts had been made to lynch them. They were in jail for the murder of a peddler named Frank Ward (variously described as either German or Irish), but the event that incited the violence was their success in obtaining a new trial.  Henry and Sylvester Polk, along with alleged accomplice Monroe Kuykendall, were originally indicted for murder in Howard County in September 1884 but obtained a change of venue and had their trial relocated to Pike County. Kuykendall’s case was later separated from that of the brothers. According to a summation of the affair in the April 22, 1885, Arkansas Gazette, Ward’s older brother, living in Prescott (Nevada County), had equipped Ward “for a …

Pollard, Odell

Odell Pollard was an Arkansas lawyer credited with playing a major role in the development of the two-party political system in Arkansas during the last half of the twentieth century. Pollard was chairman of the Arkansas Republican (GOP) state executive committee during Governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s administration. Odell Pollard was born on April 29, 1927, on a farm in Union Hill (Independence County). Pollard was the third of four children of Joseph Franklin Pollard and Beulah Scantlin Pollard. He attended a one-room school at Union Hill through the eighth grade and then attended high school in Oil Trough (Independence County) until his graduation at age sixteen. He then entered the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), attending for two …

Pope-Noland Duel

The Pope-Noland Duel took place in Arkansas Territory in 1831 between William Fontaine Pope and Charles Fenton Mercer (Fent) Noland. Little is known about Pope other than that he was the nephew and secretary of territorial governor John Pope, who was a member of the Democratic Party during his tenure in Arkansas. Fent Noland originally hailed from Virginia and was the son of politician and plantation owner William Noland, who drafted Virginia’s anti-dueling law. As a young lawyer, Fent Noland was mentored by James Woodson Bates, who was the first Arkansas territorial representative to the U.S. Congress, and went on to become a well-known writer who regularly published in the New York–based Spirit of the Times. The political scene in …

Postoak, John (Execution of)

On December 20, 1878, a Creek man named John Postoak was executed at Fort Smith (Sebastian County) after being convicted of the murder of a white man named John Ingley and his wife. Little is known about John Postoak except that the Wilmington Daily Gazette reported that he was the son of a member of the Creek Council. Reports indicated that he was twenty-five years old. In early October 1877, Postoak went to Ingley’s remote home near Eufala (in what is now Oklahoma). A later report in the Fort Smith New Era holds that Postoak first requested that Ingley’s wife write two letters for him, “which he expected to send to Okmulgee by Ingley,” but that Ingley replied that he …

Pounds, Winston (Lynching of)

Winston Pounds, accused of breaking into a white man’s house and assaulting his wife, was hanged by a mob near Wilmot (Ashley County) on August 25, 1927. Census records indicate that Winston Pounds Jr., born around 1906, was the son of farmer Winston Pounds and his wife, Florence Pounds. As sometimes happens, published accounts of the lynching vary significantly, especially between white-owned and African-American-owned newspapers. According to the Arkansas Gazette, Pounds, described as a “Negro farmhand,” entered the J. W. McGarry home while he and his wife were sleeping and assaulted Mrs. McGarry. She screamed, and he fled. Some accounts say that J. W. McGarry was actually in Little Rock (Pulaski County), and that Mrs. McGarry’s sister was staying with …

Powell, Charles (Lynching of)

On August 11, 1926, an African-American man named Charles Powell was lynched near Lewisville (Lafayette County) for allegedly murdering sheriff’s deputy James Dooley. According to the Shreveport Times, a warrant was issued for railroad worker Charles Powell on charges of beating his wife. On Wednesday morning, August 11, Deputy Dooley was sent to serve a warrant on Powell at the railway car on a side track of the Cotton Belt Railroad where he was living. Dooley was described by the Arkansas Gazette as “one of the most popular officers of the county,” while Powell was referred to as “a powerful negro…known as a bad actor” who had previously resisted arrest. When Dooley approached, Powell drew a pistol and shot Dooley …

Powell, Sam (Lynching of)

On July 6, 1910, an African-American man named Sam Powell was lynched near Huttig (Union County) for allegedly robbing A. E. Lucas and setting his house on fire. The Nashville Tennessean reported that Powell was only eighteen years old at the time. He may have been assisted in the crime by another African-American man named Claude Holmes. There is no record of a young African American named Sam Powell living in Arkansas in either 1900 or 1910. However, in 1900, an eight-year-old African American named Sam Powell was living in Lincoln Parish in northern Louisiana with his parents and eight siblings, and news stories about the lynching reported that Powell initially escaped to a lumber town named Rochelle in Grant …

Pratt, Parley P. (Murder of)

Parley Parker Pratt, an original member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was murdered in Arkansas in 1857 and buried in the state, despite his wishes to be buried in Utah. The Van Buren (Crawford County) newspaper Arkansas Intelligencer, on May 15, 1857, deemed Pratt “a man of note among the Mormons.” While another notable event involving Mormons in Arkansas—the massacre of Arkansas emigrants four months later at Mountain Meadows, Utah—was formerly linked to Pratt’s murder in Arkansas, more recent inquiry suggests other circumstances may have ignited the violence at Mountain Meadows on September 11, 1857. Pratt was one of the key figures in the early Church leadership. Pratt’s writings, which …

Price, Norman Dale

Norman Dale Price was an attorney who spent a notable career at Little Rock (Pulaski County) as a trial lawyer. Soon after getting a law license in 1951 and moving to Little Rock, Price set up a law firm with, among others, state Senator Max Howell, who would become for many years the most powerful person in the Arkansas legislature. Price would become a leader in both the state and national Trial Lawyers Associations, and his career also included a ten-month stint as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Dale Price was born on February 26, 1924, in Bear Creek Springs (Boone County), a community north of Harrison (Boone County), the youngest of four children of Albert Pike Price …

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 …

Pro-ISIL Hack of Arkansas Library Association

In 2016, a pro-ISIL group hacked the website of the Arkansas Library Association (ArLA) and released the membership directory to other ISIL supporters as a scare tactic, although the breach had few consequences for the organization. In June 2014, the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), also called Islamic State (IS) or the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), declared a global caliphate (Islamic state ruled by a religious leader). By March 2015, ISIL had established its rule over sizeable portions of Syria and Iraq and benefitted from sympathetic supporters around the world. Starting in 2015, pro-ISIL supporters began waging indiscriminate cyberattacks against various Western websites and databases. Hackers specifically targeted websites …

Pryor, Doris

Doris Pryor is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She assumed that role in December 2022 after serving in a variety of legal positions since her graduation from law school and admission to the bar in 2003. Doris Lenea Clark was born in 1977 in Hope (Hempstead County) to James and Linda Clark. She and her brother Michael grew up in Hope, and she was an honor student and president of the school’s student government. After graduation from Hope High School in 1994, Clark attended the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) in Conway (Faulkner County), from which she graduated cum laude in 1999. She spent the year after her graduation from UCA working in …

Pugsley v. Sellmeyer

Pugsley v. Sellmeyer is the title of an Arkansas Supreme Court case that dealt with a disciplinary decision made by the school district of Knobel (Clay County) pertaining to a student being suspended for wearing talcum powder on her face. The case has been cited in other legal actions, namely in students’ rights lawsuits, and appears in various books focusing on these matters. At the beginning of the 1921–22 academic year, Knobel High School principal N. E. Hicks informed a student assembly of new rules of conduct adopted by the district’s school board. One of the mandates prohibited female students from wearing low-necked dresses or immodest clothing, as well as banning cosmetics. Earlier in the day, senior Pearl Pugsley had …

Pulaski County Lynching of 1894

On March 11, 1894, a group of African Americans discovered the body of a “mulatto” woman hanging from a tree about halfway between Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Marche (Pulaski County). The woman was never identified but was estimated at thirty years old. The body, according to reports, appeared to have been there for several days (the Arkansas Gazette even described the corpse as “decayed”). Around her neck was a placard reading, “If any body cuts this body down, they will share the same fate.” As the Arkansas Gazette reported, “The woman is supposed to have been lynched, but when, by whom and for what reason no one is able to state.” Indeed, although this murder is typically counted among …

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 …

Pulaski County Reported Lynching of 1889

In rural Pulaski County in 1889, three or four men were reportedly lynched for having beaten a prosperous farmer to death while robbing or attempting to rob him. However, the reports surrounding this event are very vague and sometimes contradictory. Although this event is included in many tabulations of lynching victims for the state, there may be reason for doubting whether a lynching actually occurred. National reports provide the most details about this event. For example, the December 18, 1889, report in the Indianapolis Journal, is one of many similar articles that circulated nationally. On Saturday, December 14, 1889, Henry Wright, described as a “well-to-do farmer,” was on his way to Fletcher’s store in the community of Big Maumelle when …

Purtle, John Ingram

John Ingram Purtle was a populist lawyer and politician who spent eleven tempestuous years as a justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court late in the twentieth century. Purtle—who was called “the Great Dissenter” in a law review article after his death—resigned from the court in 1989 because of enduring conflicts with his fellow justices, most of whom he said had judicial philosophies that were “not in harmony” with his own. Four years before his resignation, Purtle had been charged in an arson-for-profit scheme with his legal secretary and another person, but he was acquitted in a jury trial. John Purtle was born on September 7, 1923, the middle child of nine children of John Wesley Purtle and Edna Gertrude Ingram …