1941 Raleigh murder case had national impact

In the early evening of Saturday June 14, 1941, law enforcement officers took into custody E. E. “Johnnie” Ashcraft, a dragline operator whose wife’s lifeless body had been found lying in a Raleigh ditch nine days before.

Taking him to the fifth floor of the Shelby County Jail, Ashcraft was placed at a table under a bare bulb where officers peppered him with questions about his wife’s murder. For the next 36 hours Ashcraft was deprived of food, water and sleep as detectives lobbed a constant barrage of questions and threats at him.

Around 9 a.m. Monday morning, the police prepared a statement for Ashcraft’s signature claiming he had hired an African American named John Ware to kill his wife.

Refusing to sign, Ashcraft declared he never made such a confession. The dispute over what happened during that weekend in Memphis eventually reached the United States Supreme Court whose decision had a significant impact on the conduct of police interrogations across the nation.

Ashcraft and Ware were indicted for murder and a trial was held in the fall of 1941. Both men were convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison, but in a quirk of fate the verdict was overturned because the presiding judge unexpectedly died before signing the conviction papers.

The United States Supreme Court became involved in the case when a second jury relied on the disputed confession to sentence the pair to 99 years behind bars. James F. Bickers, Ashcraft’s attorney, joined with Ware’s attorney, Grover N. McCormick, to argue that the defendant’s constitutional rights had been violated.

“Our appeal to the Supreme Court is based on the fact that Ashcraft was kept under a bright light for 36 hours. We charge that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was violated -- the duress clause, which says no man shall be deprived of his life, liberty or property without due process of law, and no man shall be forced to give evidence against himself,” Bickers explained to the press.

Oral arguments were heard on Feb. 28, 1944, and the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on the first of May.

Written by Justice Hugo Black, the court declared that Ashcraft’s Fourteenth Amendment rights had indeed been violated because his statement “was not voluntary but compelled.”

The Court then ruled that the Constitution “stands as a bar against the conviction of any individual in an American court by means of a coerced confession. There have been, and are now, certain foreign nations with governments . . . which convict individuals with testimony obtained by police organizations possessed of an unrestrained power to seize persons suspected of crimes against the state, hold them in secret custody, and wring from them confessions by physical or mental torture. So long as the Constitution remains the basic law of our Republic, America will not have that kind of government.”

Unfortunately for Ashcraft and Ware they remained in custody until finally freed in June of 1946 after two more trials and a further clarification by the U. S. Supreme Court.

In the five years the case wound its way through the court system, the United States participated in the Second World War, which was fought and won, at least in part, to preserve the legal protections that eventually freed Ashcraft and Ware. By convincing the justices to place constitutional limits on the power of the police to compel incriminating statements, James Bickers and Grover McCormick struck a blow for liberty as powerful as the destruction of those governments committed to unrestrained police power.

G. Wayne Dowdy is senior manager of the History Department, Memphis and Shelby County Room, Benjamin L. Hooks Library.