The defense attorney for ten striking New Mexico miners facing potential death sentences, framed-up for the murder of a sheriff shot by his own deputies, speaks of their case.

‘The Frameup in Gallup’ by A.L. Wirin from The New Masses. Vol. 15 No. 8. May 21, 1935.

(The writer, a Civil Liberties Union attorney, is now taking part in the attempt to force an investigation of the kidnaping of Robert Minor and David Levinson.)

SANTA FE, N.M. TEN GALLUP miners still face death sentences as the result of the fatal shooting of Sheriff N.R. Carmichael and two workers in Gallup last April 4. That they must await trial by jury on charges of first degree murder, is the decision of District Judge M.A. Otero, Jr. after hearing the state’s evidence against them and thirty-eight other miners and their wives, in the course of preliminary hearings just held before him at Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition to these charges, they and four others–three of them women–will be tried for aiding a prisoner to escape from the custody of officers of the law. Four of them will be imprisoned in the state penitentiary without bond until the trial; six may have their liberty until then if their friends can raise $7,500 bail for each of them; while bail for the remaining four is $500. All charges against all other workers (except deportation proceedings) have now been dismissed.

Thus far every step in the “Gallup Cases” has in each instance set a new landmark in official lawlessness and terror. There have been more “arrests” than in any case in recent American history. The District Attorney admits 601 were “questioned” by him and the 200 specially-deputized Legionnaires and mine employees (“gun-thugs” the workers call them). Two hundred men, women and children were formally arrested; about seventy-five were actually charged with first degree murder; forty-eight were on trial at the preliminary hearings just concluded.

More homes have been raided, searched, and ransacked than in many years–and this includes the San Francisco and Pacific Coast terror following the General Strike. Fifty homes were raided under search warrants; at least fifty more without benefit of any such pretense.

And now ten workers await trial for their lives. This number is larger than those finally tried in any labor case in the United States in recent times–including the Mooney, Gastonia and Haymarket cases.

I shall consider here the state’s testimony presented at the preliminary hearing, and the defense evidence as disclosed to me. Let us take the state’s case first.

Shortly after nine in the morning on the fourth day of April a group of workers began to gather in front of the court room of W.M. Bickel, Gallup’s Justice of the Peace. At nine that morning Exiquel Navarro, militant labor leader, was scheduled to have a trial on charges of reentering upon property after eviction. (The charges were filed by State Senator C.F. Vogel, New Mexico’s racketeer politician, acting either for himself or for the Gallup American Coal Co.–the record is not clear for whom.) Members of the gathering crowd sought to enter the court room to attend the trial. (Both the Constitution of the United States and of New Mexico expressly guarantee a “public” trial.) With the exception of one member of the crowd who persuaded the officers standing guard at the door that he was a witness in the case, no one was allowed to get in. On the witness stand Judge Bickel testified that this was pure accident; that he gave no orders that anyone be kept out. Sheriff D.W. Roberts testified that Judge Bickel had ordered him not to allow anyone in. Except this witness, no one did get in. Suddenly the crowd, now anxious, suspicious and indignant, saw their comrade taken by the officers to the rear exit; the crowd rushed into the alley in the rear of Judge Bickel’s courtroom.

Sheriff Roberts, the state’s “star-witness,” from the witness stand told a story of as clear-thinking, straight-shooting, heroic a western sheriff as any wild west movie thriller ever portrayed–he was talking of himself.

He and Sheriff Carmichael with Navarro, the prisoner between them, stepped into the alley. Other deputy sheriffs were behind them and to their left; the crowd was in front of them, forming a semi-circle around the rear exit. They “worked their way” through the crowd, turned east and walked forty or fifty feet. Then he heard two shots fired, and Sheriff Carmichael fell into his arms–mortally wounded. Instantly he turned west; he saw Ignacio Velarde about fifteen or twenty feet away aiming at him; further to the right (west) and down the alley he saw Solomon Esquibel also aiming at him. He pulled his gun; shot at Velarde. Velarde fell dead; then he shot at Esquibel–at the first shot he went down on his hands and knees, and immediately got up; Roberts fired again–this time Esquibel didn’t get up. Altogether fifteen or twenty shots were fired.

Velarde and Esquibel had shot and killed Sheriff Carmichael; he shot and killed them both, Roberts concluded.

Dr. B.L. Travers who removed one bullet lodged in Sheriff Carmichael’s body testified that it entered under the left arm, traveled in an oblique direction upward; that another entered the left side of the neck; the bullet removed had a .45 calibre steel jacket.

What do the workers say? They assert not only the innocence of their living comrades, but also of their dead ones–Velarde and Esquibel, for whose deaths no one has yet been prosecuted, or arrested.

In the first place they say they went to Judge Bickel’s court for the sole purpose of attending a public hearing of their comrade and leader. Had they intended to rescue him from the clutches of the law, they would have arrived before, not after, nine o’clock–the time set for the trial. The time they would have sought to effect the rescue was when Navarro was being taken to Judge Bickel’s court; or certainly when the officers first appeared with their prisoner in the alley, and most certainly not when the Sheriff was forty or fifty feet away from the crowd, after having gone through it.

More than that, the workers assert they were not armed; that no weapons were found upon the defendants nor upon any of the hundreds arrested; that although both Velarde and Esquibel fell helpless and lifeless in the alley no gun was found upon either of them or anywhere near them (and, as the lawyers say, “or at all”).

They conclude with the charge that the Sheriff was shot by his own deputies. The deputies were to the left of the Sheriff; the crowd, Velarde and Esquibel to the right. The bullets that killed Sheriff Carmichael came from the left. And all of the sheriffs carried .45 calibre pistols.

In any event, upon Roberts’ own testimony, those who killed Sheriff Carmichael are now dead. But under an old New Mexico territorial statute never before used, all persons present when a peace officer is killed are equally guilty, whether or not they actively participated in the death.

Sheriff Roberts further testified that the fact that the ten miners held for trial were always “in the front rank” of labor and unemployed activities in Gallup, and the additional fact that he considered their activities harmful, was a pure coincidence in so far as their arrest and prosecution is concerned.

The workers say the prosecution is directed to persecute their leaders, to crush and smash their militant labor organizations.

At the preliminary hearing, as counsel for the workers, I charged: “I do not say that the Attorney General of the State of New Mexico and the District Attorney are in the actual pay of the Gallup American Coal Co. I do say that they should be, for they are serving well the interests of the mining corporations of Gallup who will stop at nothing to destroy the workers’ organizations in order to continue their exploitation.”

The forthcoming trial in June will disclose whether the charges of the prosecution, or of the workers, are true.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v15n08-may-21-1935-NM.pdf