Biography
Stanton Story was a Black man from Pittsburgh who spent nearly five decades in Pennsylvania prisons after being convicted of the July 3, 1974 killing of Pittsburgh police officer Patrick J. Wallace Jr., and who maintained until his death that he was innocent and had been framed. According to the prosecution, Story — who had escaped from Western Penitentiary about a month earlier — shot Wallace during a street encounter; Story insisted he was not the gunman. Tried before an all-white jury, he was convicted and sentenced to death.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court twice set aside his death sentence amid intense scrutiny of racial bias in capital sentencing (Commonwealth v. Story, 476 Pa. 391 (1978)), and on December 28, 1981 it upheld the conviction but reduced his sentence to life imprisonment. Over more than forty years inside, Story came to be recognized by prison-rights advocates as a political prisoner and a symbol of racially biased capital prosecution, and he never stopped asserting his innocence. Terminally ill with cancer, he was granted compassionate release from the State Correctional Institution at Frackville in April 2023 and died on June 9, 2023, at the age of 70.
A March 1978 report describes the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordering a new trial because the prosecution had used irrelevant and prejudicial evidence. It also records Story joining four other Western Penitentiary prisoners in a suit alleging abuse, inadequate food and violations of their constitutional rights. The retrial order did not establish his release.
The Black Panther, March 4, 1978, volume 18 no. 7, PDF page 9.
The Abolitionist Law Center, which represented Stanton Story, reports that his compassionate-release petition was initially denied and that reconsideration resulted in a grant on April 28, 2023. Its December 2024 report says he subsequently spent his final weeks at home before his death on June 9, 2023. The court’s grant date does not by itself establish the exact day he physically left prison.
Abolitionist Law Center, A Call for Greater Compassion, December 2024, printed pages 22–23.
