On the Courthouse Lawn by Sherrilyn Ifill

Author:Sherrilyn Ifill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2007-11-24T16:00:00+00:00

The Law In All Its Majesty

The Baltimore Sun ran a political cartoon titled “The Law in All Its Majesty,” showing a beleaguered and impotent Judge Duer after the Armwood lynching.

Judge Duer was a witness in the grand jury hearing into the lynching, in which, after receiving the testimony of forty-two witnesses, the grand jury found no true bill—Maryland’s way of saying no cause for indictment—against anyone associated with the lynching. Oddly enough, the grand jury made its report for the January term to Duer, who thanked the jury and discharged them on January 25, 1934. The grand jury did report an indictment against Sam Johnson, a black man accused of killing a white woman in Somerset County on New Year’s Eve. In a repeat of the now-familiar pattern, Johnson had been removed to Baltimore for safekeeping. Duer announced that it would be unnecessary to bring Johnson back to Princess Anne immediately for arraignment.51

Duer lost his reelection bid the next year, but his colleagues provided a balm to his pride by selecting him as chair of the Somerset County Bar Association. He went into practice thereafter with his son, E. McMaster Duer, and with Charles Hearne, who as a law student had observed the lynching of Matthew Williams from the balcony of the Wicomico Hotel in 1931. The firm of Duer, Hearne, Duer was located in Salisbury at the intersection of Main and Division Streets—across the street from the courthouse, just yards from where Matthew Williams was lynched.

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