Baldwin documented false conviction and prosecutorial suppression decades before mass incarceration discourse.

Evidence

Baldwin had a remarkably prescient view of the incarceration problem. Over the course of his life, he had experienced the brutality of American police in Harlem and saw up close the country’s peculiar brand of justice. In No Name in the Street, he used the case of Tony Maynard, an aspiring actor whose family lived close to Baldwin’s when he was young and who worked as Baldwin’s personal assistant for a time, to show that the criminal justice system crushed black people with intention. In 1967, Maynard had been falsely accused of murdering a twenty-one-year-old white marine sergeant named Michael Kroll. Maynard rejected an offer of a plea bargain and was tried three times. After a hung jury and a mistrial, he was finally convicted in December of 1970 and sentenced to ten to twenty years in prison. Baldwin wrote about this period and his attempt to win Maynard’s release. In the epilogue of No Name, Baldwin mentioned that he was still “waiting to hear the fate of Tony Maynard, whose last address was Attica.” Two years after the publication of the book, in April 1974, a judge released Maynard on bail when it was revealed that prosecutors had suppressed information about a key witness. The district attorney dismissed the case altogether later that year. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 523

Categorization

• XREF: This detailed Maynard wrongful-conviction story connects to the reader’s broader argument about late Baldwin’s prescience and to carceral studies literature.