MN Board of Pardons grants state’s first-ever posthumous reprieve to Max Mason

The state Board of Pardons today unanimously voted to grant the state’s first-ever posthumous reprieve to Max Mason, a black man sent to prison on charges of raping a white woman in Duluth in 1920, but released four years later when a judge and prosecutor determined the evidence against him was very weak. Governor Tim Walz chairs the Pardons Board and said the reprieve is long overdue adding “by not addressing this it continued the systemic racism, it allowed things to happen that have happened, there’s a direct line between what happened with Max Mason and Clayton, Jackson and McGhie, there’s a direct line to what happened to George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis.” Walz is referring to three other black men–Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson and Isaac McGhie–who were falsely accused in the rape and murdered by a lynch mob.