Prosecutor might seek sharecropper’s posthumous exoneration

ATLANTA (AP) — A Georgia district attorney says he may revisit a decades-old case in which the state Supreme Court overturned three murder convictions of a Black sharecropper in the killing of a white man to determine whether the sharecropper deserves to be formally exonerated posthumously. Weaknesses in the case were detailed in a book published this year, “The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Carroll County District Attorney Herb Cranford has launched a review of the case and could ask a judge to formally clear Henderson’s name, as charges against him were never dismissed. Henderson was convicted three times for the 1948 killing in Carrollton of 22-year-old Carl “Buddy” Stevens Jr., a white Georgia Tech student.