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Fugitive Free

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It was like an oldtime anti-slavery meeting in the New Jersey Assembly chamber at Trenton one day last week. The crowd whooped and hissed, not quite aware where its humanitarian instincts ceased and where its sectional fervor began. Georgia had come to take Robert Elliott Burns back to one of its notorious chain gangs. Almost everybody in New Jersey thought he had a good idea of what a chain gang was like. The case of Arthur Maillefert, 22-year-old New Jersey boy who died last summer in a Florida sweatbox, was fresh in mind (TIME, Oct. 24). Radio and Press had broadcast the Burns story: how he went to War, returned jobless, was convicted of a $5.85 grocery robbery in Atlanta, escaped once to set up a substantial business in Chicago, escaped the second time to write his cinematized book, I Am a Fugitive From a Georgia Chain Gang.

Defense counsel, including Arthur Garfield Hays of the American Civil Liberties Union, put Burns's plump grey mother and preacher brother on the stand for emotional appeal. A penologist testified that Georgia's penal system was "the worst," that Burns would die if returned. Counsel argued that Burns had been led to believe he would get a quick parole if he waived extradition when he returned to the chain gang in 1929.

Then the defense played a last high trump, introduced "the best judge" in the case—Grocer Samuel Bernstein, the victim, now living in Far Rockaway, N. Y.

"Do you think Burns should go back to a chain gang,'' he was asked.

"I do not."

"The defense rests."

Up stood John I. Kelley, Assistant Attorney General of Georgia. He pointed to the 250-lb. warden of the Troup County chain gang, asked if his moon face was not "full of the milk of human kindness." He continued: "We are proud of our State and its history . . . not a vindictive people . . . not going to inflict punishment . . . make us the butt of ridicule . . . the people of Georgia need no defense."

Shortly thereafter, Jersey's Governor Arthur Harry Moore, with an extradition requisition laid before him, announced: "I have heard enough. ... I feel constrained to deny the application. ..." He was still talking when the crowd began to cheer. Prisoner Burns kissed his hand, promised not "to exploit this decision for my own benefit."

In Atlanta, said Governor Richard Brevard Russell Jr.: "This decision makes it easy to understand how the most horrible crime of modern times, the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, which shocked the entire world, could occur and go unpunished in a State whose Governor has such ideas of law."

Governor Moore was at a crippled children's Christmas party when the message reached him. Smilingly said the Governor of New Jersey to the Governor of Georgia: "I wish the Governor of Georgia a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and respectfully refer him to the Fuller case."*


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