Joan Little

Joan Little (pronounced "Jo Ann") (born 1953) is an African-American woman who was charged with the 1974 murder of Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, who attempted to rape Little before she could escape.

Her case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights, feminist, and anti-death penalty movements.

Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault.

Her case also has become classic in legal circles as a pioneering instance of the application of scientific jury selection.

Little was born and raised until age 15 in Washington, a town of under 10,000 in North Carolina's rural Atlantic coastal region.

Her mother, Jessie Williams was a "religious fanatic" who frequently consulted "root workers," or hoodoo folk healers.

Her father was a security guard in Brooklyn, New York.

The eldest of six blood siblings, she was forced to care for them and her four half-siblings as well.

She took to running away and hiding and soon fell in with an older crowd who supported her rebellion.

Her social worker, Jean Nelson, who once called her an "escape artist," also noted her intelligence, telling her "some day you could do a lot of good."

As a teenager, she worked in the tobacco industry and as a waitress.

Little's problems with the law began in 1968, when her mother asked a judge to declare her a truant and to commit her to the Dobbs Farm Training School in Kinston, North Carolina.

After a few weeks at Dobbs, Little fled, walking to a nearby service station where she and a friend hitched a ride back to Washington.

Her mother realized she had not been duly released and so sought to legitimize her daughter's situation by procuring an official release.

She later sent Joan to live with relatives in Philadelphia.

Three weeks after graduating from high school there, Joan developed a thyroid problem and returned to North Carolina for an operation.

In 1973, she went to work with a sheetrock finisher named Julius Rogers, whom she later accompanied to Greenville and later to Chapel Hill, where she would become entangled with the law.

In December 1973 and January 1974, Little, now 20, incurred a spate of arrests for theft and eventually for breaking and entering, with escalating legal consequences.

In the coastal town of Jacksonville, North Carolina at the end of 1973, she was charged with the possession of stolen goods and the possession of a sawed-off shotgun, but was not prosecuted.

On January 3, 1974, she was arrested in Washington, North Carolina for shoplifting.

That charge, too was dismissed.

Six days later, she was again arrested for shoplifting, a charge for which she was given a suspended six-month sentence.

Six days after her release, she was again arrested and charged with three separate counts of felony breaking and entering and larceny.

Her trial was set for June 3 and she left town in the interim.

Her brother, Jerome Little, acted as Joan's partner for certain break ins and another string of criminalized offenses that led her to be imprisoned in 1974.

She returned to Washington in time for the trial, accompanied by Julius Rogers and two minors.

The minors ended up in jail, where they were sexually harassed by a guard who offered them freedom if one of them would "give him some."

Little was convicted on June 4, 1974, and asked to remain in the county jail rather than be transferred to the Correctional Facility for Women in Raleigh, as would have been customary.

Remaining in Washington, she said, would allow her to remain close to home, where she could work on raising her bond.

Nearly three months later, before dawn on August 27, 1974, a police officer delivering a drunken prisoner to the Beaufort County jail discovered the body of jailer Clarence Alligood, 62, on Joan Little's bunk, naked from the waist down.

Alligood had suffered stab wounds to the temple and the heart area from an icepick.

Semen was discovered on his leg.

Little was missing.

She turned herself in to North Carolina authorities more than one week later, and said that she had killed Alligood while defending herself against sexual assault.

Clarence Alligood had a record of forcing female inmates to take part in sexual favors as payment for gifts he'd given them.

Other inmates had previously stated that he had given them gifts in the form of snacks and magazines and expected to receive sexual favors.

Since Little had fled from prison she was known as a fugitive and the police were therefore authorized to kill her on sight, so Little turned herself in at Raleigh.

She was put on trial for murder and was facing the North Carolina gas chamber.

She had found refuge in the home of an older black man from her community and had also received offers to seek refuge in other countries.

Little was charged with first-degree murder, which carried an automatic death sentence.