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In Pender County superior court last week, three key prosecution witnesses testified that they had lied at the original trial under pressure from Prosecutor Stroud. The star witness, Allen Hall, a black youth with an IQ of 78 and a long criminal record, swore in confusing testimony that while he was under observation at a mental hospital before the trial, Stroud had promised him a short prison sentence; he said he was coached to insist that he had helped set the grocery ablaze under Chavis' direction. Another witness, then 13 years old, said Stroud gave him a job and a minibike in return for anti-Chavis testimony —gifts that Stroud credited strictly to "real strong personal feelings of a positive nature" toward the youth.
After re-examining the key witnesses, the convicts1 lawyers produced a white minister from New Jersey who swore that Chavis had an alibi. The Rev. Eugene Templeton, a former pastor in Wilmington, and his wife Donna both testified that they were elsewhere with Chavis at the time he was allegedly fire-bombing the grocery. The couple left the area a short time later and did not testify at the original trial because, they claimed, they feared arrest or injury.
A Washington-based committee has succeeded in drumming up national and international publicity for the convicts. Black Radical Angela Davis, speaking to a Communist rally in Paris two weeks ago, claimed that the case was part of a national racist conspiracy in the U.S. Pravda featured a jailhouse interview with Chavis and added that the U.S. press had ignored his appeal while devoting "whole pages to inventions about the so-called persecution of 'dissidents' in socialist countries."
After the hearing ends, probably this week, Judge George Fountain is to rule on vacating the convictions. Since the major prosecution witnesses have frequently changed their stories, any such order would probably mean speedy release for the prisoners, but Chavis says he has little hope of that. Nor is he confident about an FBI investigation ordered by Attorney General Griffin Bell. The best hope for the Wilmington Ten, he said, lies in marshaling public pressure on the President to urge a North Carolina pardon for them. "We are political prisoners," he says, "and in political-prisoner situations, the public decides the case, not the courts."