"The Peculiar World of American Sheriffs" Topic

"I didn't set out to write about sheriffs. I was working on a history of a 1933 murder that began with the beating, robbery, and death of a white shopkeeper in the tiny town of Pompano in Broward County, Florida, and ended with the 1940 United States Supreme Court decision known as Chambers v. Florida. That decision, which ex-Klansman turned Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black read over the radio on Lincoln's birthday, determined that confessions extracted through the use of terror were inadmissible. It was one of the building blocks that led to the Miranda rules and to legal limits on what law enforcement officers can do to a suspect.

It was clear that Broward's long-serving sheriff, Walter R. Clark, had his fingerprints all over the Chambers case. Clark took charge of the search for the murderer, authorized warrantless searches of Black farmworkers' homes, supervised the violent interrogation of two dozen Black men and one boy, and the weeklong torture of four men who, just a month later, were sentenced to death based on their forced confessions. The sheriff also operated the jail where those violent interrogations took place, maintained the whites-only jury rolls, and barred Black people from the courtroom except as defendants or witnesses. As a letter of complaint to the governor put it, "A colored man's life isn't worth a plug nickel in Broward County, under the dictator-ship of Sheriff Walter Clark."…"

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Armand