Through the lens of a 1927 mur­der and the ensu­ing tri­als of three sus­pects, An Evil Day in Georgia exam­ines the death penal­ty sys­tem in Prohibition-era Georgia. James Hugh Moss, a black man, and Clifford Thompson, a white man, both from Tennessee, were accused of the mur­der of store own­er Coleman Osborn in rur­al north Georgia. Thought to be involved in the ille­gal inter­state trade of alco­hol, they were tried, con­vict­ed, and sen­tenced to death on cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence with­in a month of the mur­der. Thompson’s wife, Eula Mae Elrod, was tried, con­vict­ed, and sen­tenced to death the fol­low­ing year, but was released in 1936 after her case gained noto­ri­ety in the press. ​“Moss, Thompson, and Elrod…were almost clas­sic exam­ples of per­ceived social out­siders or rebels who ran afoul of a judi­cial sys­tem not designed to pro­tect them but to weed them out and dis­cour­age oth­ers who might think about chal­leng­ing the sys­tem,” author Robert N. Smith says. ​“Moreover, all three tri­als were held in cir­cum­stances where local ten­sions ran so high that con­vic­tion was vir­tu­al­ly assured.” John Bessler, author of Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment, said, ​“In An Evil Day in Georgia, author Robert Smith rais­es lin­ger­ing ques­tions about the guilt of two men — one white and one black — exe­cut­ed for a mur­der in the Deep South in the 1920s.… The telling of this sto­ry, one that played out in the Jim Crow era and the days of boot­leg­ging and the Ku Klux Klan, expos­es the death penalty’s imper­fec­tions even as it calls into ques­tion the verac­i­ty of a woman’s con­fes­sion, lat­er recant­ed, that once brought her with­in a stone’s throw of the state’s electric chair.”

(R. Smith, ​“An Evil Day In Georgia,” The University of Tennessee Press, 2015.) See Books and History of the Death Penalty.

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