hung, strangled and beaten, she seeks to hold the killers of her child accountable. the stakes are high, but the only way to get justice is to pursue the killers in criminal court. i don t know all the negotiations that were involved. i trusted a lawyer who sold me out, and i ended up getting a plea deal. it was a hard decision. there were threats on my life. everybody hated me. everybody hated me. at that point, we reached an agreement with jeff sessions. and the agreement was, since tiger had incriminated henry hays, tiger would be allowed to plead guilty to a civil rights violation in the federal system and was to have been sentenced to a life term.
and when he went in, henry hays looked at him and said, will you forgive me? and he said, i forgive you. 42-year-old henry hays died in alabama s electric chair early this morning after refusing a last meal. and i think we cried all the way back home from home and prison. we cried all the way back home because we knew that chapter was finally over. nobody wins when it s like that, because two families have been destroyed over a simple act of pure hatred. at some point, benny felt some guilt because he knew that he probably had cost that boy his life. my biggest regret is never having tried benny hays. the trial ended in a mistrial
someone has taken a young man, hung him in a tree. who would do something this hideous? michael donald was an innocent good samaritan, not a thug. the crime scene was in the same block where this group of klan lived. what better place to start? the mobile police department just didn t want to believe that mobile would still have klan in it, but they did. we felt the cops and the klan were working hand-in-hand. ain t gonna tolerate this. thomas figures, he s in a position to push and nudge and make sure that this case does not rest from a criminal standpoint. i stuck to the klansmen. the more i asked questions, the more they talked. tiger knowles finally cracked. and he names henry hays. gotcha. got him, man, got him. so, when we think about michael donald, how long will it take for his family to get justice? how many years? how many decades?
i don t think they would have gone. they did it with his blessing. bennie hays was a tyrant, and henry was deathly afraid of him. but henry always tried to please his father. and it just never seemed to be good enough. get off me, son of a get it off! mr. hays probably told him, oh, we can do this and nothing will be done to us. i just really believe, because, typically in the south, white people think they can do things and nothing will be done to them. and i think he convinced him, if you do this, oh, they ll never find out that you done it. most people that do crimes, they feel like they will never get caught. in the history of the state of alabama, only one white man had ever been sentenced to death for the murder of a black