The defendant, Harold Rutledge, was a twenty-nine-year-old African American man. He had shot and killed Jay Wilson, a white man. The racial deck of playing cards was stacked in favor of the prosecution. “Forty years earlier,” Middleton said, “There wouldn’t have been a trial in Indiana. The Black man would have been lynched in the public square the day after the shooting.”
Jesse noticed the defendant was dressed in street clothes for the trial. But once it was time for lunch and the jury had been excused, the sheriff’s deputy-bailiff handcuffed the defendant and took him away through the door that led to a holding cell.
The man had not been able to post a bond while he waited nearly a year to get to trial. The judge allowed the man to wear street clothes for his trial since having the ju
