And now, at long last, it was over.

Though officials with the state Bureau of Pardon and Parole had at first noted with some measure of sadness that there may not have been much they could do to set matters right in the case of Lena Baker, in early August, 2005, the board changed its mind.

chapter continues

advertisement

It had taken 60 years.

On Aug. 15, the board announced that it had decided to clear Baker's name, making her only the third person in the state's history to receive a posthumous pardon.

For more than two weeks, the board kept the text of the official document under wraps. But at an Aug.30 ceremony in Atlanta, attended by Roosevelt Curry, Lena baker's nephew along with other family members, the board at last released the official document.

It is a brief document, only one page long, but it addresses, as directly as any bureaucratic document can, the idea that for six decades, Lena Baker had been wrongly convicted and executed for murder.

"E.B. Knight was a prominent member of the local community and Lana Baker was not," the document states. "The weight of the evidence was such that Lena Baker could have been charged with Voluntary Manslaughter, rather than murder for the death of E.B. Knight...nonetheless, the jury found Lena Baker guilty of murder and failed to recommend mercy, thereby requiring the judge to sentence her to death by electrocution."

"While the board does not find that Lena Baker was innocent of this crime, the Board's decision in 1945 to deny clemency...on her sentence of death was a grievous error as this case called out for mercy."

And with that, the board reversed a 60-year-old error, a wrong that cost a woman her life. "Be it now hereby proclaimed that...that the Board should have granted Lena Baker clemency on her death sentence and in recognition of this wrong does hereby grant her posthumously a full and unconditional pardon."