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Joan Little and the Ice Pick
August 15, 1975: Joan Little
Washington, North Carolina. 1974.
A 20-year-old Black woman is in Beaufort County Jail on a charge that shouldn't have been a felony. A jailer with a history of assaulting Black women in that jail walks into her cell after 10 p.m. with an ice pick.
Hours later, he's dead on her bunk. She's gone.
The state charges her with first-degree murder. Mandatory death penalty. In 1974, everyone in eastern North Carolina knew how that case would end.
On August 15, 1975, a jury went out. Six Black jurors, six white jurors — a jury that should never have existed in that…
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