Susie Williams Carter was one year old when her 16-year-old brother, Alexander McClay Williams, was convicted of murder and executed in an electric chair in 1931. More than 90 years after her brother’s death, “I want the world to know that he did not do this,” says Carter, 94. It took decades, and the work of the great-grandson of Williams’s defense lawyer, to clear his name. Williams, the youngest person to be executed in Pennsylvania history, had his conviction overturned in 2022 when attorneys brought the case to court after finding that investigators ignored evidence and pressured Williams, a Black youth, to sign several confessions before his trial.
Williams’s exoneration of the almost century-old conviction was a watershed moment for his family. It cleared the way for them to seek further recourse. On Friday, they sued Delaware County, Pa., and representatives for the estates of two detectives and the prosecutor seeking unspecified punitive damages for Williams’s wrongful conviction and execution, reports the Washington Post. Williams was arrested in 1930 after a White matron at the reform school he attended was found dead. Vida Robare, 34, had been stabbed with an ice pick 47 times in a grisly killing that caused national intrigue. Williams, who was arrested long before the 1963 Supreme Court ruling that guaranteed criminal defendants the right to counsel, denied the allegations initially but was questioned five times without a lawyer or parent present and ultimately signed three confessions. A bloody handprint of an adult man found at the crime scene did not match Williams’s handprint. Robare was discovered by her ex-husband, whom she had recently divorced for “extreme cruelty.,” Detectives told a local newspaper that Robare probably was overpowered by an adult.
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