Milan Resetar

Date of death:18. 10. 1931
Gender:Male
Race:White
Era:1920s
State:Pennsylvania
Time Imprisoned:
1 Year 10 Months 22 Days
Support
Communism Civil Liberties
Milan Resetar

Biography

Milan Resetar, of Woodlawn, Pennsylvania, was one of three Communist Party members convicted under the Pennsylvania sedition law in 1928. (See the entry for codefendant Pete Muselin in Chapter 13 for a description of his case.) Resetar began serving his sentence on November 26, 1929 at the Allegheny County Workhouse at Blawnox, Pennsylvania. In an August 1930 letter from prison he described Blawnox as a place of "appalling" "filth," "swarming with bed bugs, roaches, lice and other vermin." By September 1931, Resetar had become very ill, but was denied proper medical attention. According to one report: When he could hardly stand any longer they sent Milan Resetar to the prison infirmary. "Palpitation of the heart, " they called his ailment. Five days later they thrust him out again, back to the grim prison workshop and the bleak prison cell. They said he was "improved." And then the old doctor went off on a vacation and a new doctor took his place. He saw this sick man staggering in anguish. The sweat of death was already on his face. A week after he had been dismissed from the infirmary as healed, they carried him to a bed again. They found his lungs eaten up by tuberculosis, his heart enveloped in a pus sac. The state of Pennsylvania declined Resetar's request to be released from prison and transferred to a hospital. He died in custody on October 18, 1931, after 691 days — one year and eleven months of a five-year sentence.

Case

Allegheny County Workhouse
Charges: Sedition (Pennsylvania Flynn anti-sedition law; organizing Jones & Laughlin steelworkers at Woodlawn, now Aliquippa — the red raid of November 11, 1926).
Sentenced: 1927
Incarcerated: Nov 26, 1929
Released: Oct 18, 1931
Sentence: Five years of hard labor at the Allegheny County Workhouse at Blawnox, on conviction under Pennsylvania's Flynn anti-sedition law. Entered custody November 26, 1929 and died there on October 18, 1931 — 691 days, one year and eleven months. The death is recorded in the death_in_custody_date column rather than as a plain release, which is what that column is for: the model sets the release date to match, so the imprisonment stops at his death instead of running on, and the record says how the custody ended rather than leaving it to read as an ordinary discharge. His death date on the prisoner record is also sharpened from October 1931 to the day. The row previously held the five-year sentence and a month-precision release, with no institution and no incarceration date, so the profile published no imprisonment figure at all. It also carried the generic import charge of a federal Espionage and Sedition Act prosecution; this was a state prosecution under a Pennsylvania statute. On the year. This record now gives the conviction as 1927, stored at year precision. Two of the biographies in this case say 1928. 1927 is preferred because the raid was in November 1926, because the fourth defendant's record gives 1927 for the conviction and 1928 for his discharge on appeal, and because the appeals — the Pennsylvania Superior Court, then the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, then a refusal to review by the United States Supreme Court in 1929, then custody in November 1929 — do not fit into the time a 1928 conviction leaves. The 1928 date may be the sentencing rather than the verdict. A court docket would settle it.
Convicted: Yes — died in custody at Blawnox on October 18, 1931
Institution State: Pennsylvania

Related Cases

Pete Muselin Pete Muselin Tom Zima Tom Zima Steve Bratich Mike Matty