Phagan Family Newsletter Number Six: 09/12/2020

Last Updated on June 3, 2024 by Mary Phagan

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Will New District Attorney Bow to Pressure to Exonerate Leo Frank for Murder of Little Mary Phagan?

Attorney Fani Willis beat Fulton County DA Paul Howard Jr. in a landslide victory —72% to 28% But will she bow to the same pressure that was put on her former boss to exonerate a man who raped and murdered our family member? The Conviction Integrity Unit established under Fulton County DA Paul Howard was not transparent: the Phagan family was not contacted and he refused to acknowledge the Phagan family. Obviously, it was set up for one single goal—to “legally” clear Leo Frank of a heinous murder—and to pin his crime on a Black man! The recent D.A. election victor Fani Willis is making strong statements about her integrity and skill, but so did Howard before succumbing to the behind-the scenes pressure from the ADL, ex-governor Roy Barnes, and Rabbi Steven Lebow, whose apparent goal has been to lie their way to victory. Fani Willis is quoted recently in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

“Cases won’t be for sale under my administration. Not for an endorsement, not for money, not for anything.” “You have my word, during my tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, we will become a beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation.” “Willis vowed to bring ‘transparency and accountability’ to the DA’s office.” [Willis] “announced she intends to clean house in the Public Integrity Unity, which handles police-involved shootings.” How about cleaning house in the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU)? So, how is it that Leo Frank—a privileged white rich man convicted of murder and having exhausted every possible court appeals process, and having been previously rejected as a pardon candidate—now gets a CIU Review? For over a century, propaganda has masqueraded as “new evidence”: there have been plays, articles, books, videos, movies, dramas claiming death-bed confessions, bite marks and teeth x-rays (no evidence), and anti-Semitic pogroms (no evidence). Virtually all these works have simply disregarded the physical evidence to claim that an African American man named James Conley committed the crime. They ignore Conley’s riveting 15- hour testimony under oath that proved Frank was the murderer. Frank himself refused to testify and would not be sworn at his own trial. Nor would his attorneys dare to cross-examine twenty young girls who testified that Frank had sexually harassed them constantly—he was the Jeffrey Epstein/Harvey Weinstein of his time! Today, Frank’s advocates rely on the 1982 errorfilled “testimony” of an elderly Alonzo Mann who claimed to see many things in 1913 that simply could not have happened. That is what the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles found when they dismissed his new statements as insufficient to exonerate the murderer. Frank’s advocates made a second attempt at obtaining exoneration in 1986, which resulted in the Parole Board granting a posthumous pardon “without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence.” More recently, requests to the Georgia Governor and the Georgia Legislature (2017 requests denied) have tried to enforce Frank’s innocence but do not provide any new, original evidence that would vacate the original verdict of guilty; rather, they just parrot propaganda of other pro-Frank partisans. Conviction Integrity Unit In 2019, Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” that he said would review the Leo Frank murder conviction of 1913. Those named as participants in this move are the following:

• Former Governor Roy Barnes
• Rabbi Steven Lebow
• ADL Attorney Dale Schwartz
• Melissa D. Redmon, director of the UG
Law School
• Former Supreme Court
Justice Leah Ward Sears
• Former Court Chief Justice
Norman Fletcher
• Cobb County Superior
Court Chief Judge J.
Stephen Schuster (Retired)
• Assistant District Attorney
Van Pearlberg

The Family of Mary Phagan believes that these individuals have “colluded” since August of 2018 to find a way to vacate the conviction of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan. Dale Schwartz was quoted thus: “we’re still trying to get a new trial that would, in effect, exonerate him.” Every serious student of the case is aware that in 1914, after his conviction and death sentence, several attempts were made by Frank’s supporters to “exonerate” him using “new evidence” that included planted evidence and false witness affidavits later found to have been obtained by bribery and other illegal means. [See the Atlanta Constitution, May 5, 1914, p. 1.] This corrupt behavior IS STILL GOING ON! According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 7, 2019), D.A. Howard stated, “The Frank Case helped inspire the creation of the new unit” and that former Gov. Roy Barnes “will serve as a consultant,” and it was further reported that Barnes “had lobbied the district attorney to reexamine Frank’s case.” Let us be clear what that means. Former Gov. Barnes has swayed, influenced, and brought pressure (political bullying) to bear on the Fulton County DA’s office to reexamine the Frank/Phagan case. Those statements alone convince us that there will be no fair hearing—the Conviction Integrity Unity has already re-adjudicated the Leo Frank case. According to the article, Barnes said he is convinced that this will happen: “‘There is no doubt in my mind, and we’ll [Who is “we?”] prove it at the appropriate time, that Frank was not guilty.’” Former Governor Roy Barnes should recuse himself from this case, as well as members of and “consultants” to the Conviction Integrity Unit who have categorically stated that Frank is not guilty. NO NEW EVIDENCE! After all his big and small deceptions revealed in his February 2020 lecture in Savannah, the ADL’s expert on the Leo Frank case, author Steve Oney, finally got down to the reality that after 107 years of failed attempts to exonerate Frank, D.A. Paul Howard’s new Conviction Integrity Unit will have NO NEW EVIDENCE to make a judgment. Oney told the audience, “I don’t see any new evidence out there” that might add anything new to the case. This is a bombshell because D.A. Paul Howard has said, “The unit will investigate claims of actual innocence to determine whether new evidence or facts may prove a convicted defendant didn’t commit the offense.” Howard went further: “The CIU will review cases in which there is new factual, physical, or forensic evidence. The unit will also review cases in which there is relevant evidence that went untested at the time of trial or some other new evidence that a person was convicted wrongfully.” Aimee Maxwell, the director of the D.A.’s Conviction Integrity Unit, was interviewed on WABE’s Closer Look program and was asked, “What is the criteria” for evaluating a case? Ms. Maxwell answered: “Well, for actual innocence, what we’re really looking at is some new evidence—evidence that a court hasn’t looked at...” The fact is, every bit of “new evidence” only supports the verdict of guilty. The new CIU established by D.A. Paul Howard, and now headed by D.A. Fani Willis, has been made aware of the serious perjuries that have been told to exonerate Frank and to posthumously convict the African American man who Frank set up to take the fall. This is not a theory—this is a documented fact. Will the D.A.’s Conviction Integrity Unit continue the deception? History shows that the integrity of Frank’s conviction is secure. The integrity of the District Attorney and her office is what really is at stake. The Hypocrisy of the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) & the Leo Frank Case The Inaugural Conviction Integrity Unit Reception was held at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta on Wednesday, January 8, 2019. The Keynote Speaker was Ambassador Andrew Young, Jr. But what is the Conviction Integrity Unit? According to its own description, “The Conviction Integrity Unit endeavors to review past convictions for credible claims of actual innocence, wrongful conviction, and, where feasible, sentencing inequities. This process is afforded to applicants regardless of whether they are pro se or represented by an attorney. The CIU is committed to ensuring all submissions receive a thorough and equitable review.”

Cases the CIU will review:

1. Claims of actual innocence
2. Claims of Constitutional Violations
3. In the interest of Justice
4. Sentence Modification
5. Cases of Historical Significance

That sounds good, but this CIU was NOT the brainchild of the Fulton County D.A. According to former governor Roy Barnes, a group of pro-Frank crusaders (including himself) brought the Leo Frank case to the D.A. to ask him to exonerate this murderer (and to convict a black man for Frank’s 107-year-old crime!) The Milledgeville Journal reported that “When Howard asked Barnes what he had in mind, Barnes said he wanted to see if he could get the judgment against Frank set aside. Howard said he was open to the idea, but believed if he assembled a team to consider it, the team should look at more than one case [such as Wayne Williams].” So it was already determined that the Leo Frank Case would be reviewed before the announcement of the CIU! The Leo Frank Case did not follow the CIU’s own protocol. Why not?

Same Ol’ Lies, Over & Over

Rabbi Steven Lebow, Jerry Klinger, Allison Padilla-Goodman of the ADL, Barnes, and their ilk continue to push the same lies and distortions. This is why none of them will actually publish any serious or scholarly work on this subject, like the Phagan family has done. It would be considered laughable. Here are some facts that they tried to keep hidden from D.A. Paul Howard: Leo Frank was prosecuted after a grand jury with five Jewish members indicted him.
•
All three Georgian newspapers in 1913 had Jewish editors, and they never reported anti-Semitic slurs or shouts either before, during, or after Frank’s trial.
•
Frank appealed the guilty verdict and lost 13 separate times.
•
The claims that the trial was dominated by a mob chanting “Kill the Jew!” was debunked by their own expert, Steve Oney, who said “It never happened.” Why aren’t these facts ever brought up? If one reads the old newspapers, as Oney did, one will not see any mobs or read any anti-Semitism. There were orderly crowds of curious people who waited to get in to the courthouse to view the trial, but that was it. Read many of these articles on LittleMaryPhagan.com. We have made them available to the public. Why won’t LeBow et al. provide proof of their tired false claims. Nowhere can it be found in the original newspapers that there was a “mob outside of the courtroom shouting anti-Semitic slurs” at the jurors or anyone else. The Jewish people were respected members of society in Georgia at the time as well. The religion of Leo Frank played no role in his guilty verdict or his lynching, which was the result of the reprehensible crime he committed. Oddly enough, it was Frank’s own mother who brought religion into the trial by embarrassing herself in court with the shouting of anti-Christian slurs at the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey.

Jerry Klinger has made a career out of corrupting the facts of the case even though the provable realities have been presented to him on multiple occasions. Nevertheless he recently wrote that “Georgia media’s reporting encouraged their basest desires, the Jew’s blood,” which is an outright falsehood. Of course, today’s Georgia media can easily check this claim, having full and complete access to all of their own archives. Yet, for some unknown reason they won’t. So, Klinger, Lebow and others can blatantly lie with impunity, never fearing they will be challenged. Author Steve Oney, whose 742-page book is considered by the ADL as their top authority, reported: “To the extent that there was bias in the coverage, it was mostly in Frank’s favor…” He goes on to state that Atlanta’s newspapers, “evincing the prejudices of the time, ridiculed the state’s star witness—a black factory janitor named Jim Conley…” In fact, Atlanta’s media declared Frank an innocent man and when they brought up his Jewish background, it was only to reinforce how much integrity he had as the leader of B’nai B’rith. The three Georgian papers—all with Jewish editors—went along with Frank’s defense team in their racist desire to pin the crime on two separate African American men—first Newt Lee (the night watchman who discovered the body), and then Jim Conley. Multiple articles of the Klinger kind are being written every year memorializing Frank’s lynching, either refusing to acknowledge that Leo Frank could have been guilty (based on the mounds of evidence), or blatantly lying about “anti-Semitic mobs” or Frank’s Jewish background being a major factor in the case. More people need to write the truth of the matter so that people are not misled and so that an injustice is not committed against Mary Phagan and the Phagan family.

The ADL has been promoting a lie—for over a century!

“HANG THE JEW, HANG THE JEW” is what the ADL says was chanted during the month-long trial, but its own expert Steve Oney says it NEVER OCCURRED! According to Oney, at the time of Mary Phagan’s murder, “Atlanta was a philo-Semitic city. Its assimilated, German-Jewish elite were part of the financial and legal power structure…” The governor in Frank’s 1915 commutation, John Slaton, also addressed the false claim of an “anti-Semitic mob” surrounding the courtroom pressing to lynch Frank: “No such attack was made and…none was contemplated.” Governor Slaton also countered the false claim of an “anti-Semitic” atmosphere by reminding Frank supporters that Jews were highly respected and appreciated in Georgia because they had been “conspicuous” contributors to the history and development of the state. Mr. Oney refutes the claim that there were anti-Semitic mobs shouting “Hang the Jew!” He told the Jewish Journal: “[I]t didn’t happen. It was something that someone wrote a couple [of] years after the crime, and then it got stuck into subsequent recountings of the story…. Jews were accepted in the city, and the record does not substantiate subsequent reports that the crowd outside the courtroom shouted at the jurors: ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.’” It has been claimed that “anti-Semitism” and the “hatred of Jews” motivated Frank’s conviction and lynching. And yet, incredibly, there was no anti- Semitism expressed by police, detectives, prosecutors, jurors, judge, or reporters! There was no “prejudicial trial” or “mob rule” or anti-Jewish bigotry of any kind. Most people are unaware that the prosecutor first brought his case against Leo Frank before a 23-member grand jury that included five prominent members of the Jewish community (including at least two from Frank’s own synagogue), and all the grand jurors signed the bill of indictment against Leo Frank. The Leo Frank trial judge Leonard S. Roan was once a law partner of one of Frank’s defense attorneys and, according to a confidential ADL memo: “In general, the rulings of the trial Judge had been favorable to the defense.” Frank’s defense attorney even declared after the trial: “We do not make the least criticism of Judge Roan. [He] is one of the best men in Georgia and is an able and conscientious judge.” The false claims of anti-Semitism are simply unfounded and untrue.

Roy Barnes’s False Statements

“I’m convinced through the reading not only did he not get a fair trial, he was not guilty. The case just simply was wrong....There’s no question he didn’t get a fair shot.... There is substantial reasonable doubt as to whether Frank was guilty.” The FACTS: Roy Barnes recently told some law students that “If you get interested in this case,” they should read the book by author Steve Oney. But when asked if the trial jury “ignored the facts in the case,” Oney responded, “No, I think there was a reasonable case against Leo Frank.” Even Gov. John Slaton, who (under political pressure) commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment in 1915, wrote: “The Supreme Court…determined as a matter of law, and correctly in my judgment, that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the [guilty] verdict. Leo Frank: White Privilege White Privilege is the unearned, mostly unacknowledged social advantage white people have over other racial groups simply because they are white. In 1913, Leo Frank was convicted for the murder of Little Mary Phagan based on the direct evidence found at the scene of the crime as well as circumstantial evidence and because he was a “sexual deviant/degenerate” with a long history of sexually molesting his female employees. Leo Frank and his defense team used “White Privilege” as a tool to play on white fears about stereotypes of “Negroes” being savage beasts and pathological liars. Scholars of the case have admitted that Leo Frank and his supporters actually relied on racism to defend himself against charges they knew were true. Jewish historian Theodore Rosengarten bluntly asserted that “Readers who wish to find a progressive Jewish social ethic at work in the Frank camp will be sorely disappointed. Frank’s lawyers played the race card for all it was worth.” He was not the only one:

Documented Sources: White Privilege and Leo Frank’s Racism

Harry Golden, A Little Girl is Dead (1965), p. xv:

“Until the mid-1960s, let alone in 1913, no white man in any of the old Confederate States had ever been convicted of a capital offense on the testimony of a Negro.”

Robert Seitz Frey and Nancy Thompson-Frey, The Silent and the Damned (1988), p. 109: “Leo Frank was convicted on the strength of a black man’s testimony—truly a rare event in the South in the early years of the twentieth century. Certainly the words of a black man were almost never taken over those of a white man. And Frank was convicted by an all-white jury.”

Jeffrey Melnick, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South (2000), pages xi, 8, 37, 43, 61, 100, 111: “…Frank and his supporters used racist language to demean Conley and took refuge in what they understood to be the privilege of Jewish whiteness.” “This represented the first capital case in postbellum southern history in which a ‘white’ defendant was condemned by the testimony of an African American.” “…Jews like Leo Frank were much more likely to take up whiteness as a self-concept and mode of behavior than their northern counterparts…” “Frank considered himself to be white and enjoyed the privileges thereof, including African American domestic help and control over a large number of poor southerners—white and African American.” “Another of Frank’s lawyers referred to Conley as a ‘dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger.’”

“…Frank’s people tried to establish Frank’s ‘whiteness’ (and I mean that doubly here to signify his racial standing and his innocence) by demonstrating his distance from even the most trivial constituent of American culture that might be traceable to African Americans.” “Frank’s lawyers employed racial epithets at every turn, and... capitalized on much the same sort of racist thinking that helped to turn public opinion against their man.”

Charles and Louise Samuels, Night Fell on Georgia (1956), pages 158, 159: “Again it should be noted that the men defending Frank, while protesting the [nonexistant] prejudice against Jews, saw no reason why anyone should object to their own often expressed prejudice against Negroes.” “‘Who is Conley?’ [the defense lawyer Luther Rosser] demanded. ‘Who was Conley, as he used to be and as you have seen him? He was a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger.’”

Steve Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise (2003), page 148: “For one thing, Leo Frank had already made the grounds of the impending legal battle clear. ‘No white man killed Mary Phagan,’ the factory superintendent had reportedly told a prison attaché upon hearing of Conley’s affidavits. ‘It’s a negro crime, through and through.’ The Negro to whom Frank was referring was, of course, poor Jim, and as [attorney William] Smith later phrased it, the accused was going to use every bit of his ‘ great influence and unlimited financial means’ to bring the point home to a jury.”

Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Vol 3 (2016), pages 125, 362: “Frank’s attorneys seized upon the state’s extraordinary blurring of the color line to make their stand. They looked beyond the murder of Mary Phagan and took the position that Frank’s conviction would in fact undermine sacred Southern racial traditions and set in motion a racial upheaval far more significant than Frank’s actual guilt or innocence.” “Today’s believers in the innocence of Leo Frank have continued the tactic pursued in the courtroom by his lawyers, who assigned all manner of dishonesty to James Conley: Frank’s attorneys variously called Conley ‘a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger’; ‘a dirty negro crook’; a ‘beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger’; a ‘ filthy, criminal, lying negro’—being careful to pair untruthfulness and uncleanliness with the Black race.”

R. Barri Flowers, Murder Chronicles (2014): “Racism and stereotyping had been part of the defense strategy throughout the trial, as Frank’s attorneys portrayed Conley as being ‘especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his race.’”

Nancy MacLean, “The Leo Frank Case Reconsidered” (1991), characterizes Frank’s defense as: “a virulent racist offense against ... Jim Conley.” “Frank’s attorneys based their case on the most vicious antiblack stereotypes of the day and on outspoken appeals to white solidarity...”

Dr. Stuart Rockoff, director of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience: “Thus, their defense of Frank was largely an asserting of his and, by extension, their own whiteness.”

Phagan Family Position Paper, June 2019, pages 7-9: “Leo Frank’s lawyers argued to the jury of twelve white men that murder, rape, and robbery were ‘ negro crimes’ and thus Frank, a white man, could not have committed the murder of Mary Phagan. One defense attorney said that ‘the murder was the unreasoning crime of a negro,’ that ‘It isn’t a white man’s crime.’”

Albert S. Lindemann, The Jew Accused, (1991), page 245: “Frank resorted to racial stereotypes in his own defense. He insisted that Mary must have been killed by some sort of violent, primitive brute—in short, a Black, not a Jew. Frank’s lawyers were energetic in insisting that murder of this sort was not a Jewish crime, and they did not hesitate to exploit anti-Black bigotry. They referred to Jim Conley…as a ‘dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger’...” “There was something...hypocritical about such men, denouncing the bigoty against Jews that they asserted was responsible for the charges against Frank, yet resorting to a far more explicit and vicious bigotry against Blacks in his defense. Significantly, the prosecution avoided racial stereotyping, at least of this blatant sort.” Frank’s own racist thinking is reflected in an Atlanta Constitution front-page headline on May 31, 1913: “Mary Phagan’s Murder Was Work of a Negro Declares Leo M. Frank.” The newspaper quoted Frank: “Here is a negro, not alone with the shiftless and lying habits of an element of his race, that is common to the South….No white man killed Mary Phagan. It’s a negro’s crime, through and through. No man with common sense would even suspect I did it.”

Leo Frank’s supporters then and now have played the White Privilege race card and falsely represent an African American man as the “real killer.” For 107 years James “Jim” Conley has been scapegoated in nearly all the literature on the case. He was a sweeper in the factory on the day of the murder who was ordered by his boss Leo Frank to help move the dead body of Mary Phagan. When Conley confessed to his accessory-after-the-fact role, Frank and his supporters tried (and continue to this day) to smear Conley as a devious criminal who got away with murder, but Conley’s very detailed confession—corroborated by the physical evidence at the crime scene—was so convincing that it became central to the prosecution’s case. (At trial, Leo Frank refused to be cross-examined by prosecutors, but James Conley withstood nearly 16 hours of cross-examination—under oath.) Before he accused James Conley of the crime, Leo Frank worked overtime to pin the murder on the African American night watchman who found Mary Phagan’s body, Newt Lee. Frank hired private detectives who planted a blood-soaked shirt in the innocent black man’s home, and then Frank told the police where they could find that damning “evidence.” When the newspapers reported that a bloody shirt was found at Lee’s home, it almost caused an innocent man to be lynched. Luckily for Lee, Frank’s private detectives did such a sloppy job at planting the shirt that the police were not fooled at all, and it only increased their suspicion of Leo Frank. That is the point when the people of Atlanta came to believe—and rightly so—that Leo Frank was the murderer of Little Mary Phagan. Leo Frank: “Sexual Pervert” According to Dr. Jeffrey Melnick, “The perversion charge merits special attention because it formed the emotional core of the prosecution’s case against Frank, and also became the most important constituent in public feeling against him.” So, according to the Nation of Islam, “The Frank team strategy was to stress the act of rape in Mary Phagan’s murder, and in so doing the Frank team felt they could convince a predisposed white America that only a Black man could be responsible for the brutal killing of this white girl.” Dr. Stuart Rockoff concurs: “Frank’s trial lawyers also relied upon the stereotype of the black rapist to argue that Conley was the one most likely guilty of the crime.” By the time of his lynching in 1915 many people—including his Jewish supporters—not only were repelled by Leo Frank’s abrasive personality but also believed he was in fact the murderer of Mary Phagan. Chicago icon Albert Lasker, a Jewish philanthropist and the “father of modern advertising,” paid millions (in today’s money) for Frank’s defense, but he privately admitted that he was not even convinced that Leo Frank was innocent. It was Lasker who financed all of Frank’s post-conviction appeals and orchestrated his international public-relations campaign that involved media outlets across the nation, including the New York Times. Lasker recalled the meeting in Frank’s jail cell: “It was very hard for us to be fair to him, he impressed us as a sexual pervert. Now, he may not have been—or rather homosexual or something like that…” According to Lasker’s biographer, the men with him during that encounter took “a violent dislike to him.” Lasker “hated him,” and said, “I hope he [Leo Frank] gets out…and when he gets out I hope he slips on a banana peel and breaks his neck.” The fact is Leo Frank was a sexual predator—the Harvey Weinstein/Jeffrey Epstein of his era. He, like those convicted pedophiles, used the factory he managed and the position he held to pressure little girls into sexual situations where he ruthlessly took advantage of them. And that is exactly what he did on Saturday, April 26, 1913, to thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, who came to her place of employment to collect her pay of $1.20 from her boss Leo Frank.. And just like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, B’nai B’rith president Leo Frank used the opportunity to lure Little Mary Phagan to a back area of the factory and attempted to sexually assault her. Evidence shows that Mary resisted Frank with all of her might and in the struggle he struck her and then strangled her to death. At his murder trial twenty of Leo Frank’s own female employees bravely took the witness stand and testified to Frank’s history of sexual deviance and harassment. They testified that he “got too familiar,” “put his hands on” them, tried to corner them, and proposed sexual acts to them for money. Fourteen-year-old Nellie Pettis recounted how Frank had propositioned her for sex and 16-year-old Nellie Wood testified that Frank pushed himself against her and touched her breast. Several male employees also described how they had witnessed Frank rubbing himself against young female workers. The testimony was so explicit that the judge had to clear the courtroom of women. These young girls were the real pioneers of today’s #MeToo Movement. Leo Frank’s lawyers did not even attempt to cross-examine any of the girls who testified at his trial. Instead, the defense attorneys told the jury that Frank’s behavior was: “a sign that we are getting more broad-minded... Deliver me from one of these prudish fellows that never looks at a girl and never puts his hands on her....He’s the kind that I wouldn’t trust behind the door.” Will the new D.A. finally bring INTEGRITY to the Conviction Itegrity Unit, and face the facts of Leo M. Frank’s racism and sexual deviance? Or will she let the lies and the liars have their way and allow them to pin a brutal murder of our family member wrongly on an African American man? We’ll see.

The Phagan family has no objection to anyone expressing their opinions about the Frank case, but we do insist that organizations and personal campaigns not distort the truth and facts to use this case for their own political purposes. For over 100 years, each passing decade brought with it “new historical evidence” falsely claiming to exonerate Leo Frank. The Phagan family has stated since 1982 that if there were clear-cut evidence to clear Frank of this heinous crime, we would come forward and ask for exoneration. However, such historical evidence has never come to light. Rather, there are considerable data, extensive documentation, revealing archival material, and legal, court, and government records that only support and even strengthen the guilty verdict.