A Black Georgia man sentenced to death three times for a murder he did not commit is finally getting his record wiped clean.
Some 73 years after Clarence Henderson was wrongly convicted, his charges were dismissed.
“I wish it would’ve happened sooner,” Clarence Henderson’s great-grandson Brandon Henderson told WAGA this week.
Clarence Henderson’s life took a turn for the worse on Oct. 31, 1948, in Carroll County, Georgia, roughly 45 miles west of Atlanta.
According to court records, a white couple, Carl “Buddy” Stevens and Nan Turner were on a date that evening. While out, a masked man abducted them both and attempted to rape Turner. Stevens fought the masked man off so Turner could escape, but Stevens was shot amid the fray.
Turner reportedly told police the masked man “sounded like he was Black” without any detailed description. Police started searching for Black men they believed to be Stevens’ killer.
A year and a half later, the police search found its way to Clarence Henderson in Atlanta. Clarence was already known to police, according to Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Chris Joyner, who has written a book on the case.
Police tried to pin the shooting on Clarence Henderson by claiming a .38 revolver found in a pawn shop belonged to him. Although the bullet used was from a 9mm automatic gun, police claimed Henderson “filed down” the bullet so it would fit the .38 revolver found in the pawn shop.
Court records show Clarence Henderson was arrested in December 1949, and police found a “rusty file in his home” and claimed he used it to file bullets “prior to October 1948”.
“It had been reported as stolen and investigators believe they could put the gun in Clarence Henderson’s hands for a very narrow window that would have been enough to have committed the murder with it,” Joyner told GPB.
Clarence Henderson was a sharecropper and had no known connection to…
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