Justice Betrayed

Angelina Jaramillo, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent New Mexico family, was raped, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death in her bedroom on 16 November 1931. Thomas Johnson, an African American labourer with a prison record in four states was convicted of the crime and executed. Now more than seventy years later this meticulously researched account of the case substantiates a longstanding rumour that the wrong man was put to death. The racial atmosphere, aggravated by the economics of the Great Depression, made it easy for the local establishment to engineer the outcome of the trial. In the 1930s a few well-connected people could decide that it was in the public's best interest to cover up a murder. Today the crime could be solved by DNA evidence -- but in the early 1930s an impoverished, black defendant with a criminal record made an easy target. This lively true crime story is thought-provoking and even more shocking today than at the time of the miscarriage of justice.