The Exonerated | Delbert Tibbs - A Man Wrongly Accused and Sentenced to Death
In the following essay, Cohen focuses on Delbert Tibbs, a man wrongly accused and sentenced to death, and his struggle with the legal system and the weak evidence against him.
Few victims of the capital justice system have roused public support the way Delbert Tibbs did when he was sentenced to death in 1974 for killing a hitchhiker and raping the man’s sixteen-year-old traveling companion. Tibbs, a young black theology student, was celebrated in song by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and was made a cause célèbre by the 1960s black activist Angela Davis.
Tibbs’s travails began innocently enough when he was hitchhiking his way from Florida back to his Chicago home earlier that year. Nearing Leesburg, he was stopped by a Highway Patrol trooper who said...
[The entire page is 1225 words long]
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