Rape Retrial Convicts Negro
(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) LYNCHBURG (Virginia), March 19. An all-white jury yesterday found Thomas Carlton Wansley a Negro aged 22, guilty of rape and robbery of an elderly white woman, and sentenced him to two life terms in prison. Wansley’s lawyers immediately served notice of an appeal. It was Wansley’s second trial on the charges, stemming from an alleged offence in December, 1962. He was found guilty in the first trial involving the white woman, and he was also convicted for the alleged 1962 rape of a Japanese woman, and sentenced to died in the electric chair. Both convictions were overturned by. the Virginia
Supreme Court, and re-trials ordered. Wansley’s re-trial approached something of a cause celebre among Negro civil rights leaders in Lynchburg and elsewhere, who attacked the earlier convictions and death sentences as prejudice and a symbol of double standard justice in the South.
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Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31323, 20 March 1967, Page 13
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149Rape Retrial Convicts Negro Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31323, 20 March 1967, Page 13
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