Entries - Time Period: Divergent Prosperity and the Arc of Reform (1968-2022) - Starting with L

Convicted along with an accomplice of a triple murder and robbery that took place in Arkansas, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed by the U.S. government on July 14, 2020. Lee was born on January 31, 1973, in Yukon, Oklahoma. His mother said that he suffered from seizures and a neurological impairment. He spent time in mental health facilities but was removed at least once due to violence toward staff members. At the age of seventeen, Lee participated in the murder of twenty-two-year-old Joseph Wavra III in Oklahoma City. He pleaded guilty to a robbery charge, the murder charge was dropped, and he received a five-year suspended sentence. At some point before April 1996, Lee lost his left eye, reportedly in …

Living in Little Rock With Miss Little Rock is a contemporary novel written by Mississippi native and former Arkansas resident Jack Butler. First published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1993, the novel is set in Little Rock (Pulaski County) of the early 1980s. Loosely based on the Mary Lee Orsini murder cases in central Arkansas in 1981–1983 and written in a conversational style using multiple points of view, the novel depicts local culture and parodies well-known political figures and issues of the era, including the highly publicized legal contest between the teaching of creationism and evolutionary theory which rocked the state in the early 1980s. Within this context, the author creates a psychological saga of wealth, aspirations to power, and …

Lockhart v. McCree was a 1986 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court holding that it was not a violation of the requirement that a jury be a fair representation of a community if a court removed from the jury pool—prior to jury selection—all potential jurors who had expressed their opposition to the death penalty. Building upon its 1968 ruling in Witherspoon v. Illinois, the Court clarified the concept of fair representation for a jury of one’s peers. The case of Lockhart v. McCree began in 1978 when Ardia V. McCree stood trial in connection with the shooting death of gift shop and service station owner Evelyn Broughton in Camden (Ouachita County) on February 14, 1978. While McCree denied his involvement …

Long Line Rider: The Story of Cummins Prison Farm is a 1971 novel by former prison inmate K. Wymand Keith, the pen name of Leonard Claude Bowen. Based on the author’s experiences at Cummins, the novel appeared at the height of prison reform efforts in Arkansas in the early 1970s. As is true of other writings by former Arkansas inmates, the book, while fiction, corroborates the reported abuses of the pre-Rockefeller period. Long Line Rider takes its name from the riders who supervised lines of other inmates working in the cotton and soybean fields. The riders were trusties (so called because they were trusted by authorities) who lived at the top of the prison hierarchy. At the time, Arkansas prison …