Family of an Exonerated Teen Seeks Damages
The family of the youngest person ever executed in the state of Pennsylvania — a Black 16-year-old sent to the electric chair in 1931 and exonerated by the governor in 2022 — is suing the county that prosecuted him.
Alexander McClay Williams was convicted of murder in the October 1930 icepick stabbing of a white woman in her cottage on the grounds of his reform school.
Vida Robare, 34, had been stabbed 47 times. Her ex-husband, who also worked at the school, reported finding the body, and a photograph of an adult’s bloody handprint, taken at the scene, was examined by two fingerprint experts. But that wasn’t mentioned at the trial, nor was the fact that she had been granted a divorce on the grounds of “extreme cruelty.”
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