DULUTH, Minn. _ Max Mason, a "scapegoat" for a mob that lynched three innocent black men in Duluth 100 years ago Monday, has been cleared of his century-old rape conviction.
On Friday morning the Minnesota Board of Pardons granted Mason the state's first posthumous pardon.
"This is part of a process of letting our country really be a place of liberty and justice for all," said Attorney General Keith Ellison, who sits on the board along with Gov. Tim Walz and Lorie Skjerven Gildea, chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court.
It took a unanimous vote to grant the pardon, which followed testimony from those supporting it.
"His case is like the case of hundreds of other people of color," said Jerry Blackwell, the Minneapolis lawyer who drafted the pardon application. "Mr. Mason deserves our mercy, our clemency, because we served him a tainted justice when it should have been pure."
Mason was arrested and tried following the June 15, 1920 lynching of three fellow black circus workers _ Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie _ who were accused of raping a white woman, Irene Tusken. Tusken's doctor found no evidence of an assault.
In Mason's pardon application, Blackwell wrote that without "a scapegoat to exculpate the actions of the mob ... would have meant that the lynch mob had not murdered rapists, but innocent men."
"We need to remove that from the minds of all those people in Minnesota and across the world who believe there's some thread of support for the notion that there might have been a crime, said Rogier Gregoire, a board member with the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial in Duluth. "We need desperately to help those who want to abandon the racism of that fiction so his memory can be held in all of our hearts in a clear and innocent way."
The board quickly determined it had the legal authority to grant a posthumous pardon under state law and approved the pardon without objection.
Despite a sudden timeliness with the death of George Floyd still reverberating around the world, the pardon application first came before the board in December, and Walz said it had been decades in the making.
