To Pennsylvania's Governor George Howard Earle last week went a petition from 468 inmates of Pittsburgh's Allegheny County jail. It asked him to commute the sentence of Negro Inmate William McKinley Blackwell, scheduled to be electrocuted for murdering a rival for the affections of his common-law wife. Said the petition: "We who know him, who have eaten and smoked with him for a year and a half, beseech you to save this man that he may live to see you lead to the constructive expansion of humanity."
Five hundred prisoners thronged to a...
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