Death of Clarence Alligood / Trial of Joan Little

Joan Little (born May 8, 1954) was a Black woman from Washington, North Carolina, who by early 1974, at age 20, had accumulated multiple arrests for theft and breaking and entering. She was convicted on June 4, 1974, of felony breaking and entering and larceny, and asked to serve her sentence in the Beaufort County Jail rather than be transferred to a women's correctional facility in Raleigh, so she could remain close to home while raising bond money.

Before dawn on August 27, 1974, a police officer bringing another prisoner to the jail found the body of jailer Clarence Alligood, 62, on Little's bunk, naked from the waist down, with stab wounds to the temple and heart area inflicted by an ice pick; semen was found on his leg. Little was missing from the jail. Because she had fled custody, she was treated as a fugitive, and police were authorized to kill her on sight. She turned herself in to authorities in Raleigh more than a week later, stating that she had killed Alligood while resisting a sexual assault.

Little was charged with first-degree murder, which under North Carolina law at the time carried a mandatory death sentence. The case drew national attention because North Carolina held more than a third of all pending death-penalty cases in the country, and because Little's defense — that she used deadly force to resist rape — combined racial, gender, and capital-punishment issues that attracted civil rights activists, feminists, and anti-death-penalty advocates. Her attorneys, Jerry Paul and Karen Bethea-Shields (Karen Galloway), built a defense fund that raised more than $350,000 and used newly developed scientific jury-selection methods, including comparative surveys of racial attitudes across North Carolina counties, to successfully petition for a change of venue to Raleigh.

The trial opened on July 14, 1975. Former inmates, including Phyllis Ann Moore and Ida Mae Roberson, testified that Alligood had a history of using his position to obtain sexual favors from female prisoners. Little testified over two days that Alligood had repeatedly come to her cell overnight and ultimately forced her at ice-pick-point to perform oral sex, and that she seized the ice pick and stabbed him after he let his guard down. An autopsy reportedly found that ten of the eleven stab wounds were consistent with a self-defense struggle, with one wound being fatal. Prosecutor William Griffin argued Little had lured Alligood to enable her escape.

On August 15, 1975, a jury of six white and six Black jurors deliberated for one hour and 25 minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty. Little was returned to prison to complete her earlier breaking-and-entering sentence, escaped roughly a month before she would have been eligible for parole, was recaptured and convicted for the escape, and was released in June 1979. In 1981 she was shot in New York and survived; in 1989 she was arrested in New Jersey on charges including driving a stolen car. She has not been in public view since.