DENVER—A mentally disabled man executed more than 70 years ago has been pardoned in Colorado.
Outgoing Gov. Bill Ritter on Friday awarded a posthumous pardon to 23-year-old Joe Arridy, who was executed in 1939 by lethal gas after being convicted of killing a Pueblo girl with a hatchet.
Arridy was labeled “mental defective” at the time and reportedly couldn’t tell red from blue. Ritter said an overwhelming amount of evidence now suggests Arridy didn’t commit the crime.
Arridy confessed to the killing of 15-year-old Dorothy Drain after he was picked up for vagrancy in Cheyenne, Wyo. After the Wyoming sheriff learned Arridy was from Pueblo, the sheriff got Arridy to confess to the killing, though it appears unlikely Arridy was in Pueblo at the time Dorothy was killed.
Also, the hatchet that killed Drain was later discovered at the home of a man Arridy had never met. That man denied the killing.
Arridy had an IQ. of 46—too low to be considered for the death penalty today.
“Pardoning Mr. Arridy cannot undo this tragic event in Colorado history. It is in the interests of justice and simple decency, however, to restore his good name,” Ritter said in a statement.
The Arridy pardon is the first time Colorado has pardoned someone it executed.
Ritter, who is a former prosecutor leaving office Tuesday, called the Arridy case a “tragic conviction.” He also pardoned 18 other people Friday.
Ritter commuted the sentences of 10 additional convicts, including Jennifer Reali, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 1992 for allegedly conspiring with her boyfriend to kill his wife. Reali’s parole date was moved up from 2030 to this summer.
Ritter’s commutations included four men convicted of murder while they were juveniles. Ritter said those commutations were the first issued under a Juvenile Clemency Board he established in 2007 to review requests from prisoner convicted as adults for crimes they committed as juveniles.
Last month, Ritter pardoned 20 people, most of them for minor crimes.
The Arridy pardon was Ritter’s most prominent. Arridy had no children or other descendants, but mental-health advocates and attorneys interested in wrongful convictions have long pushed for him to be exonerated.
When Arridy was put to death in 1939, he had no relatives to claim his body, so he was buried in a mass grave in Canon City, where he was executed.
Two years ago, mental health advocates placed the first tombstone marking Arridy’s death. The tombstone featured an image of Arridy playing with a train, a favorite activity even while he awaited execution. Arridy requested just ice cream for his final three meals and reportedly stepped into the gas chamber still grinning like a little boy.
Arridy never seemed to understand what was happening to him, said Robert Perske, a retired chaplain living in Darien, Conn., who wrote a 1995 book about the case, “Deadly Innocence?”
“He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, he was liked by everybody,” Perske said.
Perske said Arridy made a convenient fall guy for a public looking to avenge the grisly rape and killing of Dorothy, who was killed in her home.
“Everybody up and down the Rocky Mountains was pulling in people to question about this case,” Perske said. “Arridy was just the one they killed for it.”
