FRANK V. MANGUM

In Frank v. Mangum, the Supreme Court refused to grant a writ of habeas corpus to Leo M. Frank (1885–1915), the manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, who had been convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old girl who worked in the factory. The trial, in 1913, was marked by mob intimidation of the courthouse and everyone in it. In addition, some newspapers and Georgia politicians, especially Thomas Watson (a former congressman and national Populist Party candidate), vigorously called for Frank's conviction, in large part because he was Jewish. At the time, Jewish leaders called this the "American Dreyfus Case," referring the persecution of an army captain in France who was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly helping Germany win the Franco-Prussian War, when it was obvious to independent observers that his only "crime" was being Jewish. After the trial, Watson advocated lynching Frank in his newspaper. Even by the standards of the period, the trial was more a circus than a legal proceeding. The only witness against Frank was a janitor who testified he had helped move the body. Much of his testimony seemed inconsistent and false, but the judge overruled his attorneys who tried to suppress it. There was no other evidence against Frank, and modern research has shown that the murderer was in fact the janitor who testified against Frank. After losing appeals in the state courts, Frank appealed to the federal courts under the Fourteenth Amendment, arguing that he was denied due process of law in Georgia. In this period, the Supreme Court often overturned state economic regulations (such as in Lochner v. New York ) under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause, but the Court refused to apply the clause to a state criminal trial. Four months after the Supreme Court rejected Frank's appeal, a mob broke into the jail where he was incarcerated and lynched him.