Biography
Charles Wakefield was a 21-year-old Black man in Greenville, South Carolina, convicted in 1976 of murdering Greenville County Sheriff's Lt. Frank Looper and Looper's father, Rufus, during an alleged armed robbery on January 31, 1975 — and given a mandatory death sentence on a record of conflicting testimony. Indicted nine months after the killings, he was convicted on the word of two county-jail inmates who were offered reduced sentences and of an alleged accomplice, Wyatt Earp Harper, himself indicted as an accessory; three prosecution witnesses gave conflicting descriptions and a published composite drawing did not resemble him. A survey of Greenville County found that 72 percent of Black residents believed he had been framed. Documented in The Black Panther (July 24, 1976).