‘Can you spell lynching?’: lawyer’s shocking note in Texas execution case | Texas
In April 1999, John Balentine, a Black man on trial for murder in Amarillo, Texas, sat before an all-white jury as they deliberated whether he should live or die.
Should he be given a life sentence, in which case he would probably end his days behind prison bars? Or should they send him to death row to await execution?
Balentine had been convicted days earlier of murdering three white teenagers who had threatened to kill him because he was romantically engaged with one of the teenagers’ white sisters – an interracial liaison widely frowned upon in heavily segregated Amarillo. Now…