Let's be honest here, 2024 has been a great year for music. We're in the middle of Big Brought Summer, a bunch of a-listers of top-to-charts, and new artists to watch, keep cropping up across the board. I'm Rihanna Crew's producer of Switched On Pop, and over at our show, we're currently looking at two of the most interesting records this year. Camila Cabello's CXOXO, and Empress of's for your consideration. Both by Latin artists, these pop records get a little weird with it when it comes to the sounds we know as Latin pop.
Tunin's a Switched On Pop to see what we mean, presented by Prime Day. This episode contains references to sexual violence. Please use discretion.
I knew I wanted to be a criminal lawyer from the very beginning. I knew that there was a problem in this society with many poor people in African-Americans being incarcerated. If I wanted to help people, that's what I wanted to help. So I really didn't have any question in my mind the first day of law school until I graduated that I wanted to be a criminal lawyer and a criminal defense lawyer.
This is Karen Betheshe's Shields. She grew up in North Carolina, and after college, she enrolled at Duke University Law School. It was 1971. I don't think I ever met a black female lawyer until I was in law school after my first year in law school. How was law school? It was something to be tolerated. It was hard, and it was made to be a criminal lawyer. It was made to be hard, but I'm competitive, but all my classmates were competitive in law school was competitive.
While the Duke, Karen started interning with a lawyer in Durham, North Carolina, named Jerry Paul. Jerry Paul was a white male lawyer who did a lot of civil rights work in North Carolina. He was one of the lawyers that a lot of lawyers didn't I particularly care for. He handled all the cases that were very controversial in the era, and he represented Southern Christian Leadership Council as CLC in North Carolina.
He represented them when they handled the discrimination case, integration cases all across the state. We went with him around on his cases, and we saw how the criminal justice system really works. Karen was one of the first three black women to graduate from Duke Law School. After graduation, she immediately started working with Jerry Paul.
They used to tease me when I was interning with Jerry of them, that my first case was going to be a first degree murder case to get my feet wet. I thought they were playing, but that was true. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. The day I got my bar exam results was the day that Jerry Paul bought Joanne little into the office and said that he wanted me to help him represent her.
Joanne little was a young African-American woman that lived in Washington, North Carolina, both for county. That was accused of killing a jailer who was trying to rape her. This was in the late summer of 1974. Karen had heard something about Joanne little in the news. I was coming back from the beach. I think it was like a Labor Day weekend, and it was on the radio. What came on the radio was that a black woman had killed a white jailer trying to escape from jail. That's all I heard.
By the time I got to the office, that's all the information I had until our secretary said Jerry's coming to office with that Joanne little woman that you heard about. I said, yes, he says he wants you to help represent her. When I came out of the office, I was expecting to see an older black woman. Jerry had told her that he had a black female lawyer that was going to help him represent her. She was looking for older female lawyers. We both did a double take. Joanne was 20. Karen was 25.
She was surprised. I was surprised. She looked so young. The information that I had heard on the radio made me think she was an older mature person. She looked scared and frightened, which she should have been. She did talk a little bit, but not that much, but we carried on a conversation. We didn't talk too much at all about the case at that time. Clients don't normally tell you everything the first time you meet them anyway. This was so traumatic you had to be very careful.
Karen learned that a few months earlier, Joanne had been convicted on robbery charges and sentenced to seven to ten years. She spent 81 days at the Beaufort County jail before she escaped. Eventually, she told Karen the whole story. She told me that Alie Good, who was the jailer, clearance Alie Good had come into her sale with an ice pick and demanded favors. His notice operandi was that he would give snacks to the women inmates, which he was not supposed to do after hours.
Then he would come back and ask later for sexual favors. This particular night, Joanne was the only female inmate in those quarters. She came in and had an ice pick. This is the ice pick that the jailers used to clean out clogged drains and things. He told Tom for her to give up, give him what he wanted to have her to have oral sex with him.
She was able to get away from him. In the course of the struggle, she was able to get the ice pick away from him. There were a number of ice pick stab wounds. Fortunately, she was able to get her clothes and get out of the jail. He had the keys there so she was able to unlock the jail door and got out. This was around 3 o'clock in the morning. Then she was able to go into the community and she hid in the black community.
First, she went to a relative's home who would not take her in because they were looking for her all across North Carolina, especially in Washington, North Carolina. She found a man whose name was Pop Barnes. He was Older Man and he took her in because he knew that she was in trouble. Joanne knew Pop Barnes because she'd gone to the high school across the street from his house. She said he'd sit on the porch in the mornings and she'd greet him on her way to school.
His house wasn't far from the Beaufort County jail. Pop Barnes said he'd try to get in touch with her mother for her and that he'd ask his son to find her a lawyer. It wasn't long before police arrived looking for her. She said she saw an officer from the window holding a rifle. She hid in the bedroom between the bed frame and a feather mattress and heard Pop talking to them loudly so that she would know what was going on.
And he would not tell him where she was and they offered him even a year's salary just to tell him that he wouldn't do it because he felt that she needed help. Joanne later testified, quote, Pop said my life meant more to him than their money. The police came and searched the house multiple times. Joanne's mother, who lived nearby, was followed by police everywhere she went.
In 1974, North Carolina was one of a handful of states that still had an outlaw statute and there was talk of officially declaring Joanne an outlaw, meaning any citizen could kill her on sight and not be prosecuted. Joanne hit it Pop Barnes' house for six days. On the sixth night, someone knocked on Joanne's window. It was a family friend, a woman named Marjorie Wright.
I found her through and by some friends of mine. They told me they thought she was there. I want for sure I was going from door to door knocking until I found her. When I found that she was scared of death. Marjorie told Joanne she was going to take her to someone who could help her safely turn herself in. They had a plan to sneak Joanne out of the house without the police seeing another woman wearing a wig was going to walk into the house. Joanne would put on the wig and walk out as the woman.
Then Marjorie would drive her to a meeting point with a lawyer, Jerry Paul. Joanne said, OK. Then I looked up the street and I see this car coming. It was police car and had a lights off. Then there's a great big grown, one of them evergreen bushes like you got. There was a great big one of those there. I threw her back behind that evergreen bush. I kind of stood down and said, that's the only thing that saved us.
But after he passed, then I opened the door and then I went back and got her and put her into the car and took her to Jerry. Jerry Paul took Joanne to the house of a professor in Chapel Hill where she could stay hidden until they worked out what would happen next. At this point, Joanne said she didn't know the peguard, Clarence Alligot had died. That was the thing that impressed me because it was only after she had been rescued by Jerry Paul that she found out that he had died.
Her words, which always haunted me because I don't think I would have said it, but she said, if I had known he was going to die, I wouldn't have run. She was even offered an opportunity to leave the country and she wouldn't do it. She says, no, I want to stay here. I want people to know what really happened. There was another thing that impressed me because I had an opportunity in her place. I probably would have not been in the United States, but she refused to take that offer up.
She said, I want people to know what happened to me and she wanted to tell a story and arranged this for me with the State Bureau of Investigation for her to turn herself in. We'll be right back. Thanks to Squarespace for their support. As Squarespace says, a website makes it real, and their all-in-one platform gets you online with a great looking website very quickly.
Whether you need a place to host a travel blog or starting an online shop or need a digital portfolio, Squarespace makes creating a website straightforward and painless, with tools that you customize your website to fit your particular needs. We view Squarespace ourselves here at Criminal.
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Visit Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash Criminal to save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. Support for Criminal comes from Happily Never After, a new True Crime podcast from Wondry. Nancy and Dan Brophy were married for 25 years. Dan was a chef who taught at a culinary school in Portland, Oregon, and Nancy wrote romance novels.
On June 2nd, 2018, Dan was found dead in the kitchen of the culinary school he worked out. Nancy became the main suspect and people drew connections between her fiction and the details of her husband's death. Investigators tried to determine whether Nancy was researching her next novel or planning a murder.
Almost four years later, they had an answer. Follow Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Happily Never After, Dan and Nancy, early in ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. Shortly after Joanne Little turned herself in, the case was presented in front of a grand jury. One of the jury members was a distant relative of Clarence Alligots.
Karen Puthias Shields says that the state's chief medical examiner had also reached out to her and lawyer Jerry Paul, alerting them to evidence that supported Joanne's case. He says you need to see the medical examiner's autopsy report. It showed that Seaman was found on Clarence Alligot's leg. And therefore it was a little bit more to it than she just wanted to get out of jail. The medical examiner offered to testify in front of the grand jury, but they declined to hear from him.
Joanne was indicted on first-degree murder charges. If she was found guilty, she'd received a mandatory death sentence. The editor of North Carolina's Washington Daily News wrote that Clarence Alligot was a good man who had died in the line of duty. A writer for the paper misreported Joanne Littles Age as 25, not 20. The New York Times sent a reporter named James Reston Jr. down to Washington, North Carolina.
He wrote that people referred to it as Little Washington, or the original Washington, because they said it was the first town to be named after George Washington. And he spoke with people in the town about Joanne's case. He wrote, quote, For many of the whites in Washington, North Carolina, the most comfortable accommodation to the facts is that Joanne Littles is a bad girl who enticed Alligot, a weak man, into her cell with a premeditated plan of murder and escape.
James Reston said a local business executive told him, quote, She wasn't defending her honor in that cell. She'd lost that years ago. Reston also reported that one woman, speaking in a, quote, soft lady like fashion, said, Even if a girl has loose morals, she should be able to pick the man she wants to be raped by. I knew that it was a difficult case, but I also knew that we had the truth on our side and also believes in Joanne little.
It started adding up when we started getting some of the information we'll call discovery from the state. Some of the evidence that they had, we had to really search for it. For instance, the ice pick, the weapon that was used to stab Alligot, we couldn't find that for a while because one of the deputies had put in his locker. Then we were able to get people interested in her case. We were able to raise funds for her because, as you know, the criminal justice system, it's not for four people.
As far as amounting a good defense in a criminal case. Groups like the North Carolina Black Panther Party and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference started organizing for Joanne all across the country. They held rallies. One chant they used was, one, two, three, Joanne must be set free, four, five, six, power to the ice pick. Rosa Parks, then in her 60s, co-founded a Detroit chapter of the Joanne Little Defense Committee.
Karen Bethesheal says they didn't want to go to trial in Beaufort County, but they needed to convince a judge that Joanne couldn't get a fair trial there. Because of the attitudes on racism in that county. So we were able to do a survey to show the court that we need to have a change of venue, and that's why the case was moved to Wake County. The trial was scheduled for the summer of 1975 in Raleigh.
I saw her every day. I would travel from the office in Durham and go to the to Raleigh and I would visit her. So we were really more like sisters for a while. While she was in jail in prison. And we could talk, you know, as young black women. When I decided to let her know now, I'm the lawyer part. It got a little bit difficult. It's like with a child, you know, you're real pleasant pleasant pleasant. Then you have a discipline. Then they get a little upset.
Well, she got a little upset. I said, no, we're going to ask that I'm your lawyer and we're going to have to do this, this, and this. She didn't particularly like that too much. She's a tariff just like me, little stubborn. But I liked her. I really, I really do like her. Was she nervous? Yes. She was nervous. She was nervous. The first time I really saw her nervous other than in my office was when we turned her in to the state Bureau of investigation.
And there were two law enforcement officers that brought into the FBI director's office and they had her handcuff and shackle. I was extremely upset because she was little and they were two big men. And they had a hands behind her back and she was shackle. I hated that. And I saw her fear then. And anybody looking at me saw my anger, which lasted for a long time because I thought it was unnecessary for her to be bound and shackle like that with all these law enforcement officers around.
And I just felt it was humiliation. Did you know what the state strategy would be? Yeah. They were going to show that she was a slut. They were going to demean her and they had one theory. She wanted to get out and she lowered him into her cell.
And then she stabbed him and she escaped. That was their strategy. And the way they would do that would be able to deal with the racist attitudes that people had about black women. And also the fact that they would try to say that she was a whore prostitute and everything. She was not.
She was a young lady who had been had some trouble as a juvenile. But a lot of things that they said were not true. And we had to deal with that. I talked to her about that. And she understood what their strategy was. Our strategy was to show that it was self-defense. She defended herself. I think that was the first time that that defense had been used in the rape case.
One of the most difficult things was to deal with the issue of rape. Because during that time, people had preconceived notions about women that got raped. They brought on themselves. When women couldn't really get raped, I remember when I was in undergrad school at East Carolina. A friend of mine was raped. She was African-American. The person that raped her was African-American.
And Jerry Paul came down and the judge told him, eight no-win-a-year-old black woman can get raped. I never forgot that. And I remember that the whole time doing representation of Joello. The judge assigned to the case was a man named Hamilton Hobgood. He knew it was Karen's first trial out of law school. He never called me Karen. I think in his part of the state, they pronounced Karen Karen. And he was a Karen, how you doing today? And he was very fondly, you know, and very respectful of me.
The state had a number of prosecutors, but Karen remembers one in particular, Lester Cholmer's. The first time I saw him was the day of the first day of the trial. He came into court and he entered, just not Lester Cholmer's. The special prosecutor said, uh-huh, that I looked at his tie and that was the KKK sign. I later found out that he represented the KKK. So I didn't really have any warm feelings about him from day one.
My selection began on July 14th. There is a pool of 300 potential jurors. One reporter wrote, quote, the defense in selecting the jury will utilize a relatively new technique based on psychological profiles. They looked at things like body language. I thought we had pretty good odds. I'm not over the optimistic, realistic, but you also understand I was young too at that time. And they have a proper good thing. That's why a lot of times folks will talk about young lawyers.
And I said, sometimes it's the best ones to get, because they don't have a lot of nonsense going with them. They just do what they have to do. But I was optimistic the whole time. Joanne testified. She told the jury that Clarence Alagood brought her cigarettes and sandwiches that she had nast for, and that he'd asked her for sex. She said, I told him no, and I would really appreciate it if he left, and he left.
But then, later that night, he came back. She said, quote, he said that he had been nice to me, and it was time that I'd be nice to him. She testified that she asked him to leave, and he did not. On the witness stand, Joanne little spoke quietly. When you read the trial transcript, you see that over and over, she's being asked to speak louder. She said Clarence Alagood had been holding the ice pick near her head.
He threatened me with the ice pick, and I then did what he told me to do. She said that she tried to grab the ice pick, and it fell on the ground. Her lawyer asked what happened next, and she said, he went for the ice pick. Her lawyer said, and what happened? And Joanne little said, I grabbed for the ice pick. Joanne described Stabbing Clarence Alagood multiple times with the ice pick, and said that he fell to the ground, and she saw blood on his face.
She said she grabbed her clothes, took his keys, and ran. At one point, one of the prosecutors, a man named William Griffin, asked Joanne why she hadn't immediately gone to the police. She said, I felt at that point that they would shoot me down, instead of taking me into custody and making sure that I had safety. She said she knew if she didn't run. I wouldn't have had a chance to be in this courtroom now to tell what happened.
One reporter noted that the prosecutor made Joanne go through painful details again and again. Did you go down on your knees in front of the bunk? He asked. The reporter wrote, when she did not respond, he shouted the question three more times, until she said, he forced me down. The New York Times reported that the prosecution seized Joanne little as calculating and murderous, a hardened criminal, with the instincts of a black widow spider. We'll be right back.
Let's be honest here, 2024 has been a great year for music. We're in the middle of Big Brought Summer, a bunch of a-listers have topped the charts, and new artists to watch keep cropping up across the board. The grand ranna crews producer of Switched On Pop and over at our show, we're currently looking at two of the most interesting records this year.
Camila Cabello's C-X-O-X-O, an Empress of's for your consideration. Both by Latin artists, these pop records get a little weird with it when it comes to the sounds we know as Latin pop. Tune into Switched On Pop to see what we mean, presented by Prime Day. Prime Day is here, with Epic Deals exclusively for Prime Members. You'll feel like you just won an award. Oh, wow, I didn't even prepare a speech.
I'd like to thank my family for always needing stuff. Also Sam, my delivery guy for bringing all my awesome deals so fast, you're the man Sam! Shop deals on electronics, home, and more this Prime Day, July 16th and 17th. Karen Bethia Shields gave a closing argument in Joanne Little's trial. She decided she wanted to show the jury the dimensions of Joanne's cell at the Beaufort County jail.
We put a mass intake down on the floor of the courthouse and use that as a departure evidence to show how close the sales were and where Joanne was and where I was good was. I used that in my closing argument and I would step in the sale and I would put them in Joanne's shoes and I would put them in allegor's shoes. I wanted to feel what Joanne felt on that night and I would use that sale and I would go step in and out of the sale.
During the closing argument, the jurors started crying and that scared me. I didn't know what to do. Remember this is my first argument. Some of them were crying and my mom was going, what should you do? You can't stop. They may think because you're a female, you can't deal with folks crying. So I kept on and I got through it. I heard the jury something that her father had told her when she was a child.
My father gave my first lesson on empathy and he says but for the hands of time you could be in her shoes and she could be in yours. That's what I used for the jurors to put them in Joanne's shoes. And when I finished, the courtroom was real quiet and I thought I had done something wrong. I went in the bathroom and that was the first time since we had gotten the case since I met Joanne that I broke down and just cried. I just cried. And I knew then we had done all we could do.
The jury deliberated for just under an hour and a half. They found Joanne little, not guilty. Surprise might be an understatement for some people but a lot of the folks that on our defense team were not surprised. Because we believed in her story and we believed in her defense.
I remember there was a picture of us, some of us were just grinning and I was so happy for her because I always knew if she had been given the opportunity she would have been, she would have really excelled in a lot of things. One thing Joanne did, a lot of people didn't know about Joanne could express herself better in writing than she could by speaking. A lot of times she expressed herself through poetry and in writing. But she's very smart.
One thing that bothered me, someone somewhere, some teachers somewhere should have seen the potential in this young lady rather than seeing something negative. What did it feel like to win the case, your first case? It was most interesting to me. Like I said, a lot of things happened so fast that when I go back and I start looking at it and I said, oh, I did that. But I was very happy. I was very pleased.
The New York Times reported that Joanne began solving when the verdict was read and that as she was leaving the courthouse she said, it feels good to be free. But in the end, Joanne couldn't go home yet. She unfortunately had to serve some time for the breaking and we lost that appeal, breaking in and last night that she was in jail for originally in both county. And then a few years later, in 1977, Joanne escaped from prison again. She was recaptured in Brooklyn nearly two months later.
In an interview at Rikers Island, Joanne said she'd escaped by scaling offends and she did it because she was fed up. She said she hadn't been treated fairly. She said she'd gotten test results indicating she might have tuberculosis and no one at the prison had done anything about it. She was brought back to North Carolina and eventually released in 1979. Karen says today, Joanne keeps mostly to herself. She doesn't really talk about the trial anymore.
She's doing fine. She's doing fine. I think a lot of people will be surprised how her life is turned out in spite of what she had to go through. I know I am. But she has done well. Joanne Little was the first woman in US history to be acquitted of murder using the defense that she is deadly forced to resist sexual assault. When you were first brought into this case, did you have any idea about how big and important it would become? Oh no. Oh no, no, no. No, not at all.
Not I thought this was a regular criminal case. It wasn't until the got publicity in the New York Times. And that's when you start having it became bigger than just a regular criminal case. But it was good that it happened that way because people could really start seeing what the judicial system was like in North Carolina and other places. And that's when a lot of folks were critical of us on how we defended. They said you put North Carolina on trial.
We put the judicial system on trial, the justice system on trial. And that's what it should do every time you have a criminal case or case in court. Because the prosecutor and defense attorney have the same objective in mind finding justice, fairness, what is the truth. And if you do that, both sides should be happy. Karen kept practicing law. She mostly worked on criminal cases. And then around the late 70s, a new judge position opened up in Durham County.
And then the former, the first black judge that we had in Durham County, Judge Pearson, he asked me, I was in court one day, he called me up to the bench, scared me to death. He says, I want you put your name in the pot. And then Christmas Eve, I got the phone call. Well, it was around Christmas Eve because my grandmother was still living. And I was scared. I said, I don't know if I really can do this. And that's when she gave me my theme song for the rest of my legal career.
I don't feel no waste time. She started singing it to me. And I got the phone call that I had been appointed. And I was the first female and the first black female judge in Durham County in the second in the state. I don't believe he brought me this heart to live. Karen served as a judge for five years. Today, she's back to practicing criminal law. And I enjoy it. I still enjoy it now. Now, when I stop enjoying it, if that comes tomorrow, I'll stop tomorrow.
But I still enjoy practicing law. I still enjoy trying cases. I don't try as many as I did when I was 25. But I still enjoy it. And I love, I love the law. Is Joanne's case something that shaped the lawyer you've become? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And like Jerri Paul and Jim Roin were teasing me when I was interning with them to get my feet with. Well, they did. It almost drowned me. But it did. I saw the law from different standpoints, you know, on my birthplace case.
I saw how it could be and how it should be. My husband said to me, you're the only person I know that really believes in the law, like you do. I said, I do. I said, the law is great. It's just that men and women decide what the law is. What's men and women who have their own policies that decide how to interpret that fairly. That's a hard job to do.
It's all good about the verdict that the jurors write back in because they looked at the evidence and tried. I think that basically they relate to me as a human being and put themselves in the same position. And they came out with the verdict that I spoke to. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sceccico, Lily Clark, Lena Silicin, and Megan Kanane.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti. This episode was mixed by Emma Munger. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at this is criminal.com. Special thanks to Thomas Mills, who wrote to us about Joanne's story. If there's something you'd like us to look at in an episode, email us at helloatthisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this is criminal.com slash newsletter.
We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus. Once you sign up, you can listen to criminal episodes without any ads. And you'll get bonus episodes with me and Criminal Co-Creator Lauren Spore too. To learn more, go to this is criminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast.
Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Let's be honest here, 2024 has been a great year for music. We're in the middle of Big Brought Summer, a bunch of a-listers of top to charts, and new artists to watch keep cropping up across the board.
I'm Rihanna Cruz, producer of Switched On Pop, and over at our show, we're currently looking at two of the most interesting records this year. Camila Cabello's C-X-O-X-O, and Empress of's for your consideration. Both by Latin artists, these pop records get a little weird with it when it comes to the sounds we know as Latin pop. Tune into Switched On Pop to see what we mean. Presented by Prime Day. Prime Day is here, with Epic Deals exclusively for Prime Members.
You feel like you just won an award. Oh, wow, I didn't even prepare a speech. I'd like to thank my family for always needing stuff. Also Sam, my delivery guy for bringing all my awesome deals so fast, you're the man Sam! Shop deals on electronics, home, and more this Prime Day, July 16th and 17th.