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Leo Frank Case 30 Years Later: The No-Pardon Pardon of Leo Frank ByArchivist Mar 11, 2016 Leo Frank smiles for the camera just one day after the body of Mary Phagan was discovered, Suspicion at that time was directed to his employee, the African-American night watchman Newt Lee. Today, March 11, 2016, is the 30th anniversary of the granting of a limited pardon to Leo Frank. by John Pierson and Vanessa Neubauer IN 1983 — 70 years after the conviction of sex killer and Atlanta B’nai B’rith president Leo Max Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan — lawyers associated with the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Atlanta Jewish Federation and the American Jewish Committee tried to obtain a pardon for Frank. (ILLUSTRATION: Leo Frank gives a big smile for the camera just two days after the murder of Mary Phagan. The snapshot was published the next day, April 29, 1913 on the cover of the Atlanta Journal. It was taken at a time when it was widely believed that a Black man, Newt Lee, would be charged with the crime.) The ADL based their claims almost entirely on the 1982 affidavit of Frank’s office boy, Alonzo Mann, who took 69 years to reverse his trial testimony. Mann, elderly and with mounting medical bills, created a media sensation when he averred — contrary to what he had testified in 1913 — that he had seen another man (Frank’s janitor and accessory after the fact Jim Conley) carrying Mary Phagan’s body on the day of her murder. Tremendous pressure was placed on the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to exonerate Frank and issue him a pardon. But the Jewish groups’ efforts failed. The Board ruled that Alonzo Mann’s new affidavit added nothing of substance to the evidence and did not at all, despite Mann’s opinion to the contrary, prove that Frank was innocent. It only proved that Conley may have carried Mary’s body by a different route than the one to which he had admitted in 1913. (Even the prosecution stated — as did Conley himself — that Conley had moved the body.) The pardon request was rejected and Frank’s conviction was affirmed and upheld. So, in 1986, after some changes in the composition of the Board — and some changes in their own tactics — the ADL and its allies tried again. This time they argued for a pardon based not on Frank’s innocence, but instead on the much more limited claim that the state had failed to protect Frank from lynching and so had cut off the possibility of future appeals by which he might have attempted to prove his innocence. This time the Jewish groups were successful. The Board did issue a pardon for Leo Frank — but it was a curious pardon indeed, a pardon which specifically stated that it was in no way altering the guilty verdict which the jury had pronounced on Frank — a pardon that directly and firmly affirmed that it was a pardon without exoneration. The Phagan family were consulted by the Board in the run-up to the 1983 pardon decision, since the surviving members of the family had a great deal of personal knowledge of and documentation about the case, and would be directly and profoundly affected by any decision. It was their Little Mary who had been strangled and likely raped, after all. But in 1986, the Phagan family were not consulted. They were told about the upcoming pardon decision after the ADL and its well-heeled allies had been meeting with and lobbying the Board for six months or more. Except for the signatures at the bottom of the paper, it was a done deal. Why the secrecy? Obviously, the Jewish groups, led by the ADL — and whoever had decision-making power on the Board by then — didn’t want the victim’s family to have any say on the matter, nor any time to alert the public as to what was afoot. Mary Phagan-Kean’s Report The victim’s grand-niece, Mary Phagan-Kean, wrote one of the most even-handed books ever penned on the Frank case, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, published in 1987. Though she and her family strongly believe that the jury’s verdict — and that of the appeals courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States — was correct and that Frank is guilty, her book is very fair in its presentation of the views of the ADL, other Jewish groups, and the pro-Frank forces generally. Here we can read her report of the 1983 and 1986 pardon efforts, excerpted from The Murder of Little Mary Phagan: “I am not working for Leo Frank or his family,” [ADL lawyer] Dale Schwartz stated publicly. The core of seeking a pardon for Leo Frank, he said, was an attempt to obtain an official repudiation of anti-Semitism and bigotry and to “remove a blot on Georgia history.” As such, the petitioners based their case for pardon not on the legality of the trial and conviction of Leo Frank, but on extra-legal concerns. The League, in a memo, compared the Frank case to the Holocaust: I agree entirely that our constituency — the literate world — knows that Frank was railroaded. Our constituency also knows that the Holocaust was real, but we continue to counteract ...

30 Years Later: The No-Pardon Pardon of Leo Frank – Leo Frank Case Archive