The Dawson Five were defendants in a criminal court case in Dawson, Georgia, where they were charged with the murder of a white customer in a roadside convenience store. The five young black men, one of whom was a juvenile, became known as "The Dawson Five": Roosevelt Watson, Henderson Watson, J. D. Davenport, Johnnie B. Jackson, and George Poor.
On January 22, 1976, Gordon B. Howell Jr. was shot during a robbery of Tiny's Grocery, located at Bridges Crossroads near Dawson. On December 19, 1977, after over a year of imprisonment, time in the national spotlight, and contentious pretrial hearings; District Attorney John Irwin announced that he was dropping all charges against the five defendants, after a ruling by the presiding Judge Geer that voided Roosevelt Watson's forced confession. The court dropped the charges after finding evidence of police misconduct, including coerced confessions, intimidation, and improper identification procedures.
Murder of Gordon B. Howell Jr. On January 22, 1976, in mid-morning, store owner Tiny Denton testified that Gordon "Bubba" Howell, a white male customer in his small roadside general store, Tiny's Grocery, located in the outskirts of Dawson, was shot and killed during an armed robbery by five black youths. Howell, a farm manager and horseman from Lee County, often stopped at Tiny's for cigarettes while traveling through rural Terrell County on State Highway 32. He bought two cartons that morning. Tiny later testified that Howell paid for the cigarettes and asked him to order a box of tangelos.
A little after 10 a.m., unknown assailant/s robbed Tiny's Grocery of $150 and put a gun to the back of Gordon Howell's head and pulled the trigger. Howell, 61, died later that day at an Albany Hospital. According to Tiny, the assailants wielded a .38-caliber Saturday night special. The assailant/s also cleaned out Howell's pockets, speeding away in his truck before abandoning it at a pond less than a mile away. The murder weapon was never recovered.
Arrests and investigation Arrest of five youths Tiny Denton told the Dawson police that he recognized one of the youths that allegedly committed the hold-up murder. Denton identified Howell's killer as Roosevelt Watson, 19, a young man who lived with his mother in a rickety house near Denton's store at Georgia Highway 32 and Callis Road, six miles east of Dawson. Denton told investigators from the Terrell County Sheriff's Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that he identified Watson as one of four black men in dark clothing who entered his store after Howell did. Denton testified that he looked up and they had pulled ski masks over their faces.
The young Watson was promptly taken into custody by the sheriffs department and an agent of the GBI. Under interrogation thirty miles away at police headquarters in Americus, Watson gave a forced confession under threats of violence, admitting to the shooting and implicated four others-his older brother, Henderson, 21, a cousin, J. D. Davenport, 18, and two friends, James ("Junior") Jackson, 17, and his brother, Johnny, 18.
On Feb. 1, 1976, the Dawson Five were charged with robbery and murder. Despite Watson's confession, the youths claimed they were innocent. Denying the coerced confession, the five claimed to be carrying water from a well half a mile away to the Watson home when the robbery and slaying occurred.
Seeking the death penalty Based primarily on Denton's eyewitness account, a partial palm print removed from the hood of Howell's truck, the forced confession by Roosevelt Watson and the forced confessions from the others, District Attorney John Irwin and special prosecutor Michael Stoddard sought the death penalty for all five of the accused.
Forced confessions The Dawson Five case took place in the volatile post-civil rights era racial climate of Dawson. The racial tension in the community, paired with the racial break down of the criminal accusations, put pressure on the police force to satisfy the community demands that the killer be found. Dawson is the county seat of Terrell County, a county labeled "Terrible Terrell" by the SNCC in the 1960s for the county's racist law enforcement practices.
Roosevelt Watson claimed that police had threatened to electrocute and castrate him. William M. Rucker, a former police officer, testified he witnessed threats of physical violence made by Deputy Jack Hammack in an effort to obtain a confession from Watson. Once out on $100,000 bail and after serving nine months in jail, Watson told reporters that the police "told me they gonna put me in the electric chair ... They had these two things hooked up to my fingers. Had a thing on my arm, real tight. Said they gonna electrocute me if I didn't tell 'em." It was only later that Watson learned he was merely undergoing polygraph testing. The GBI investigator admitted that during Watson's interrogation "there was talk of electrocution." Additionally, James Jackson claimed he gave a false confession only after Terrell County Sheriff's Deputy Hammack put a gun to his head demanding he corroborate Watson's confession.
Media attention The case quickly garnered national attention as it occurred within days of the January, 1977 inauguration of President Jimmy Carter, the former governor of Georgia." Since the crime occurred only twenty miles south of Plains, Georgia, Jimmy Carter's hometown, the national media quickly focused on the case to point out the paradoxes of the "new South." During his campaign, Carter, the first President from the Deep South since before the Civil War and a peanut farmer, received support from the southern black leadership from the Civil Rights Movement. The Dawson Five case potentially complicated Carter's desire to show the nation that Georgia was ready to share the national consensus on racial equality. On his doorstep, a story was unfolding that harkened back to the very worst days of Georgia's ugly past, a land bloody with five hundred blacks lynched since Reconstruction. To further complicate matters, the death penalty statute under which the Dawson Five were to be tried had been signed into law on March 28, 1973 by Governor Jimmy Carter. Dawson was on the threshold of notoriety because of the arrest and impending capital trial of the Dawson Five.
On April 21st 1977, The New York Times ran a Sunday piece on the Dawson Five case under the title: "A Case of Murder; a Charge of Forced Confessions."
Life and Death: Dawson, Georgia In July, 1977 the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began airing a documentary called "Life and Death: Dawson, Georgia" a half-hour film about the Dawson Five and the racial climate of Terrell County. The film, produced by Andrew Dintenfass and Ron Kanter, played nationally, increasing the national exposure of the case. The documentary interviewed a swath of people from Dawson about the case, including the Dawson Five, the mayor of Dawson Jimmy Raines, the headmaster at Terrell Academy, and Officer William M. Rucker who describes on camera witnessing Deputy Jack Hammack point a gun at one of the defendants to force a confession. The archival master of Life and Death: Dawson, Georgia is in the Walter J. Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia.
Legal defense
Defense team The Dawson Five were represented by a local attorney during the preliminary hearing before efforts were made to interest the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a legal aid and civil rights organization, in taking over the defense of the five poor prisoners. In fall and winter 1976, the SPLC retained Atlanta-based Project Team Defense for the five defendants. Millard Farmer, a lawyer who had earned a reputation for defending African-Americans in racially charged cases, took the lead defense role. In one of the local Georgia newspapers, Farmer was described as "the most controversial lawyer in Georgia" because of the novel trial tactics he pioneered in capital cases. Farmer collaborated on this trial strategy with social psychologist Courtney Mullin, 37, white, from Raleigh, North Carolina, "a hippy-looking girl without the hippy mind", as one observer put it. Mullien focused her talents on forensic psychology and was well-known for her work on jury selection process during the 1975 case of Joan Little. The SPLC adopted the case and made it the focus of mass mailings, similar to the successful approach it used in the fund‐raising campaign to defend Little in North Carolina.
In addition to Farmer and Mullin, Project Team Defense was composed of other lawyers and social scientists. The group set out to use relatively new trial techniques in efforts to avoid executions, including: "Appealing to logic rather than compassion in arguments against the death penalty; prolonging trials to allow jurors to become well acquainted with defendants; using a proliferation of motions to 'capture the atmosphere of the trial' for appeal, if necessary; using social scientists to assist in challenging the composition of jury pools and evaluating the character of prospective jurors." Completing the defense staff in the Dawson Five case were the assistants, four men and eight women; seven of the twelve black, several students on leave or on vacation from their studies in college or law school; as well as a couple of other social activists.
By summer 1977, a year and a half after the crime and the arrest of the Dawson Five, the defense team had been working on the case for many months, challenging the accusations in both the legal courtroom and the court of public opinion. The defense attorneys publicly charged that their clients were innocent and confessed under coercion and physical threats from law enforcement officers. The defense helped raise bail money to get the defendants out on bail. They challenged the racial composition of the jury lists, delaying the start of the trial. This was part of Farmer's strategy to inundate the Terrell County court with pre-trial motions. Additionally, they helped to spread publicity for the case, including cooperating with a film crew from Boston's WGBH that was making a documentary for television on the case. PBS began airing Life and Death: Dawson, Ga in July 1977. The 25-minute documentary received national coverage, fueling the continued national interest in the case.
Pre-trial
Claims of innocence At the preliminary hearing, Roosevelt Watson rejected his confession, claiming that it was coerced. Neither he nor any of his co-defendants were willing to sign a confession.
Pre-trial arguments and motions Millard Farmer focused some of his numerous pre-trail motions on the racial disparity in juror pools in Terrell County. Farmer argued that in Terrell County, and other rural districts like it in the Deep South, small-town, usually all-white, juries tried and convicted black men of first-degree murder and, especially if the victim was white, sentenced them to death at an unjustly high rate. Farmer argued that such results were virtually guaranteed by the exclusion of blacks from the jury pool. In Terrell, in 1976, the population was about 60% black; however, the jury pool was 74% white. This racial imbalance was the target for the first of the many pre-trial motions on behalf of the Dawson Five, and in April 1977 it succeeded in obtaining a new jury pool with equal black and white members.
The defense aimed to put capital punishment on trial through the case of the Dawson Five. The defense aimed to turn the case from one in which five innocent black teenagers were on trial for their lives into a case in which the town of Dawson and Terrell County and their long history of manifest racism, and Georgia's newly-minted death penalty statutes were on trial in every household of the nation that could be reached by newspaper and television.