Justice Betrayed
Subtitle: A Double Killing in Old Santa Fe
Edition: 1st ed edition
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: August 23, 2002
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 240
ISBN-13: 9780826329011
Subjects: True Crime; Inter-war period, 1918-1939; True Crime / Espionage; New Mexico; United States - State & Local - General; Murder - General; True Crime / Murder; Case studies; Murder; Santa Fe
Description: "Angelina Jaramillo, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a prominent New Mexico family, was raped, bludgeoned, and stabbed to death in her bedroom on November 16, 1931. Thomas Johnson, an African American laborer with a prison record in four states was convicted of the crime and executed. Now, more than seventy years later, this meticulously researched account of the case substantiates a longstanding rumor that the wrong man was put to death.".

"Johnson's conviction and electrocution (the state's first) were used to conceal the embarrasing identity of the actual killer. Ralph Melnick's account of the cover-up reveals the underside of racial bigotry and political patronage in New Mexico. Complicit in Johnson's indictment and murder were members of the criminal justice establishment, who abetted the cover-up in a desire to protect themselves. The media, in particular the newspaper owned by New Mexico's U.S.

Senator Bronson Cutting, created public hysteria over "Negro Crime." The racial atmosphere, aggravated by the economics of the Great Depression, made it easy for the local establishment to engineer the outcome of the trial. In the 1930s a few well-connected people could decide that it was in the public's best interest to cover up a murder. Today the crime could be solved by DNA evidence - but in the early 1930s an impoverished black defendant with a criminal record made an easy target.

This true crime story is thought provoking and even more shocking today than at the time of the miscarriage of justice."--BOOK JACKET.