Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South by David Beasley

Author:David Beasley [Beasley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Nonfiction, Retail, True Crime
ISBN: 9781250014665
Amazon: 1250014662
Barnesnoble: 1250014662
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-01-28T05:00:00+00:00

10

Millionaires in Prison

Six black men died swiftly in the electric chair on December 9, 1938, but for the white “thrill killers,” George Harsh and Richard Gallogly—wealthy college students sentenced to spend the rest of their lives on the Georgia chain gang for the 1928 murder of a drugstore pharmacist—the cases were prolonged, stretching for more than a decade.

Harsh and Gallogly never expected to be incarcerated for very long. They thought they would have to serve only a few years.

Their families had not only money but also influence.

Harsh and Gallogly had both escaped death in the electric chair in a 1929 plea deal after juries twice failed to agree on a verdict for Gallogly. Harsh had been sentenced to death, but prosecutors agreed to give him life in prison if Gallogly pleaded guilty to murder. Gallogly agreed, believing that he could save both the life of his college friend and his own neck by enduring just a few years of imprisonment. And he was only nineteen years old at the time. After the plea deal, Harsh and Gallogly were both transferred to the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville in early April 1929.1 It was then the state’s only prison and was used as a clearinghouse for inmates before they were assigned to one of the more than one hundred chain gang camps across the state.

Harsh was transferred to a chain gang in Fulton County in early May 1929, but Gallogly was allowed to linger at Milledgeville after three doctors, one of them his stepfather, Worth E. Yankey, wrote statements that Gallogly was too weak to “perform hard labor on the roads.”2 This would be a pattern. Time and time again, Gallogly’s family would cite his poor health as justification for lighter duty.

For both the wealthy and the poor, the Georgia chain gang was no joke.

In his 1932 best-selling book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, Robert Burns, the white New Jersey man arrested in 1922 and sentenced to serve six to ten years on the Georgia chain gang for a robbery that netted him $5.80, shocked the nation when he described the brutal conditions. Georgia kept prisoners in cages, rolling them around from work site to work site like circus animals as they performed grueling, backbreaking manual labor, Burns wrote.

On June 21, 1922, Burns managed to escape from the chain gang, and he built a new, respectable life as a Chicago magazine publisher, but in May 1929, his jilted wife turned him in.

As Georgia began extradition proceedings to return Burns to the chain gang, he hired William Schley Howard, the same Atlanta lawyer who had represented George Harsh at trial.

Howard worked out a deal to buy a pardon from the Georgia Prison Commission, Burns would later write. Burns would need to raise a total of $2,500. Howard would receive $1,000. Each of the three members of the prison commission would get $500. One member of the commission, Vivian Stanley, even traveled to Chicago and met with Burns. Stanley

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