Actually the first man to have been brought to the threshold of punishment was Melvin Dismukes, the Negro private guard.
On Sunday evening, July 30, a show-up was staged at police headquarters, at which Sortor, Michael, Clara Gilmore, and two others viewed a number of black men, including the four private guards who had been at the Algiers on the night of the incident. Sortor identified Dismukes “as the person who beat him and others while lined up in the lobby of the Manor House”; and Michael picked Dismukes out, too.
Attorney Nicholas Smith, who took Dismukes’s case because he was counsel for St. John’s Episcopal Church, of which Dismukes’s father was sexton, objected later to the treatment Dismukes received at the hands of the police on the evening of the show-up. Dismukes, according to Smith, had gone in voluntarily to see what help he could be and heard himself being told to fall in for a show-up. Smith was not present; Dismukes was told he was being represented by a lawyer named Seymore Posner, a member of the so-called Clinton Street Bar, which consists of hangers-around who seek appointments from judges. Smith based his objection on a Supreme Court decision in 1966, in Wade vs. California, in which the Court ruled that a show-up is a critical part of a proceeding and that denial of counsel at a show-up is a denial of due process; Smith argued that Dismukes was, in effect, denied his own counsel.
After the show-up, the police took Dismukes to the Fifteenth Precinct lock-up and held him for the night. Learning of this the next morning, Smith requested that Dismukes be brought at once to Recorder’s Court, and Smith went there and waited all morning for his appearance. It was almost noon before Dismukes was brought in, saying that he had been told by detectives in the meantime that his attorney had granted permission for his subjection to a polygraph test; he had submitted to it. Smith, while acknowledging that, if asked, he would have given permission for a lie-detector test, said that whoever told Dismukes that the permission had been obtained simply lied.
Before August and Paille had been arrested, Dismukes was arraigned before Judge Samuel H. Olsen of Recorder’s Court, charged with felonious assault. He pleaded not guilty. The very next day, on August 4, a pretrial examination was held. Sortor was the only witness. He testified that Dismukes had beaten him with “a stick, blackjack, you know, one of them long sticks like a club. . . . He just struck me with the stick and asked me where, where was the gun.” Sortor told of Dismukes’s having driven him to his knees and then having hit again “across my shoulder.” Michael Clark had also been brought to testify, but Judge Olsen decided he had heard enough to bind Dismukes over for trial.
Two of the families of the victims of the murders at the Algiers asked me the same question, in effect: Why was the first man to be picked out at a show-up, why was the first man to be arrested for all that happened at the Algiers, why was the only man involved in the case to be charged with felonious assault, why was the first man to be bound over for trial, why was the first man to be taken into court in a hearing—why was this man a black man? What was it about the system of justice that produced this singular alacrity?