Giles-Johnson Defense Committee (Montgomery Co., Md.)

The Giles-Johnson Defense Committee was established in July 1962 by Mrs. Howard Ross and sixty other Maryland residents to aid three young black men, James Giles, John Giles, and Joseph Johnson, who were sentenced to death for allegedly raping a white teenage girl, Joyce Roberts, in 1961. This case outraged the community because of the severity of the sentence, the suppression of evidence by the state, and other injustices perceived as racially motivated. Due to the efforts of the committee, Governor J. Millard Tawes commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment in October 1963. The Giles brothers were retried in 1967 and the charges were dropped. Joseph Johnson was eventually pardoned by Governor Spiro T. Agnew in 1968. John Giles was shot and killed in Baltimore in 1971.

This landmark case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of the committee's exertions, the Maryland law which limits motions for trials based on newly-discovered evidence to three days after sentencing, was changed.

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