Joe Arridy was actually a young American man known for having been falsely accused, wrongfully convicted, and also wrongfully executed for the 1936 rape and murder of Dorothy Drain who is a 15-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado. He was manipulated by the police to make a false confession due to his mental incapacities.
Joe Arridy was severely mentally disabled and was 23 years old when he was executed on January 6, 1939. Many people at the time and since believed that Arridy was innocent. A group known as Friends of Joe Arridy formed and in 2007 commissioned the first tombstone for his grave. They also supported the preparation of a petition by David A. Martinez, Denver attorney, for a state pardon to clear Arridy’s name.
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In 2011, Arridy received a full and unconditional posthumous pardon from Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. Ritter, the former District Attorney of Denver, pardoned Arridy based on questions about the man’s guilt, and what appeared to be a coerced false confession. Joe Arridy ate ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Friday, Jan. 6, 1939, and spent the rest of the day playing with his prized possession, a toy train. Then, around 9:30 p.m., two men came to escort him to the gas chamber in the Colorado State Penitentiary, at Canon City.
Warden Roy Best, who took pity on the prisoner and tried to save him, described Arridy as ‘the happiest man who ever lived on death row’. Denver lawyer Gail Ireland, who later became Colorado’s Attorney General, took up his cause and gained nine stays of execution. In the end, all appeals failed. Arridy gave his toy train to another prisoner as he walked off death row, prattling about raising chickens and playing the harp, “like the padre told me,” in the next world.
Sources: TikTok Hondiey, History Of Yesterday.