John Peter Altgeld: Pardon of the Haymarket anarchists (1893)

           The Haymarket riots caused a lot of chaos on May 4^th 1886, but it was even more hectic was when the arrested anarchist were tried in court. The biggest problem that the court faced was that there was never any physical proof that any of the indicted men were guilty. However, this didn’t stop the jury from making the verdict guilty for all of them. When this jury was formed it was made as a packed jury selected to convict. Along with the unfairly stacked jury, “the judge was either so prejudiced against the defendants, or else so determined to win the applause of a certain class in the community, that he could not and did not grant a fair trial.” This fact put the men’s fate to doom before they even walked into the court room. Four of the men were hung right after the trial and the rest of them went to prison. It didn’t go along with any of our country’s laws because these men were being kept in jail for life without any evidence, which should have meant that they were guilty of no crime. Eventually on June 26, 1893, the court system recognized their mistake and released the three prisoners that were left from the incident.

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