TRIALS: A Case of Rape or Seduction?

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"One, two, three, Joan must be set free. Four, five, six, power to the ice pick."

A death weapon is an odd object for cheering. So, for that matter, is Joan Little. But the chants of some 500 demonstrators merely echoed the uniqueness of the case that came to trial last week in Raleigh, N.C. What began as an obscure slaying in a small-town Southern jail has burgeoned into an expensive legal struggle and an emotional national controversy. Supporters of Joan Little, the 21-year-old black defendant, have raised nearly $300,000 through nationwide appeals; the state of North Carolina and its Wake County are spending some $100,000 to provide lavish trial security and to prosecute the case.

The tension stems from conflicting theories of why Joan (5 ft. 3 in., 120 lbs.) stabbed Jailer Clarence Alligood (5 ft. 8 in., 200 lbs.) eleven times with an ice pick in the Beaufort County jail in Washington, N.C. (pop. 9,000), on Aug. 27, 1974. Joan, her lawyers and a spontaneous coalition of feminists, civil rights and prison-reform advocates insist that she was defending herself against rape by her 62-year-old white jailkeeper. To them, this is a classic example of the way rape victims can be railroaded by male-dominated legal systems, and of how black women prisoners are sexually abused by white guards, especially in the rural South. To the prosecutors, as well as to much of the local white population, Joan is a burglar and a woman of loose morals who lured Alligood into making sexual advances in order to break out of jail.

Bad Company. No one denies that Joan had recently fallen into bad company. Born along the Pamlico River in rural Beaufort County, she was the oldest of nine children; her parents were divorced while she was young. She attended high school in South Orange, N.J., and Philadelphia, where she had relatives. She returned to Washington to get her diploma, but quit when school officials insisted that she repeat a year. She worked as a sheet-rock finisher, making up to $275 a week, but was arrested twice in 1973 on charges that included shoplifting and carrying a concealed rifle in her car. She drew a suspended sentence for shoplifting.

Joan began living in 1973 with Julius Rogers, a Washington pool-hall operator with an unsavory local reputation. She was arrested last June with her younger brother Jerome and charged with stealing $850 worth of property from two mobile homes. Jerome turned state's evidence and got a three-year sentence; Joan later admitted her guilt but still received a stiff seven to ten years in prison. She had spent 81 days in the Beaufort jail, awaiting transfer to a women's correctional institution, when the killing occurred.