Biography
Trenton Six defendant. Acquitted on retrial 1951.
James Henry Thorpe Jr. was one of the "Trenton Six," six Black men arrested in Trenton, New Jersey in 1948 and charged with the robbery and murder of William Horner, a white furniture-store owner, in a case civil-rights advocates called a "Northern lynching." Convicted by an all-white jury in August 1948 on confessions the police had coerced, all six were sentenced to death. The Civil Rights Congress and the NAACP took up their appeals; the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1949, and at the 1951 retrial four of the men were acquitted while two were convicted and sentenced to life. Thorpe was among the four men acquitted at the 1951 retrial.
Cases
New Jersey State Prison, Trenton