Carol Menaker

When Harrisburg native Carol Menaker was selected as Juror No. 4 in a high-profile criminal trial in Philadelphia in June 1976, she never imagined that her memories of that experience would resurface four decades later in a way that would profoundly affect her life.

That’s the story she tells in her spare but eloquent memoir, “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning with Racial Injustice.” It’s a sobering account of the case of Freddy (Muhammad) Burton, a Black man convicted in the stabbing deaths of two white prison wardens at the former Holmesburg Prison, a notorious Pennsylvania correctional facility once known as the “Terrordome,” which was shuttered in 1995.

Menaker spoke via Zoom from her gingerbread-trim Victorian home in the tiny California town of Nevada City, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where she’s lived in retirement since 2012 after a career in public relations and journalism. She’s soft-spoken but passionate in describing how her misgivings about the fairness of Freddy Burton’s conviction led her to turn her experience of jury service into this book.

Sequestered in a Center City hotel for two weeks before the trial even began, Menaker felt as if she began to understand, at least partially, something of the experience of incarceration. By the time the six-day trial ended, however, she joined without protest with her fellow jurors to convict Burton of second-degree murder after a mere three hours of deliberation.

But along with Menaker’s account of her experience in the trial, which resulted in a life sentence added to the one Burton already was serving for the murder of a Philadelphia park policeman, based, his lawyers have argued, on coerced testimony and a concealed grant of immunity to the intimidated witness, she connects his story to the larger narrative of racial injustice in America.

It’s one that’s as old as slavery and as disturbingly fresh as the deaths of Black men like George Floyd and Tyre Nichols at the hands of police officers.

As Menaker explained it, a jury summons in 2017 coincided with her awareness of increased media attention to police killings of Black men in the United States. Recalling that these accounts “just really sickened me,” she said that the combination of her “inability to understand how that could happen kind of dovetailed with my looking into this.” How did it happen in this case, she wondered, as she looked back, from the perspective of four decades, on her role in the Burton guilty verdict?

Living This Case

In her book, Menaker frankly describes her “picture-perfect growing up” in a world almost empty of Black people save for the cleaning women who worked at her house. She felt herself “shrouded in a 360-degree circle of Jewishness” in her Uptown Harrisburg neighborhood, which contributed to the unacknowledged white privilege that warped her view of Freddy Burton.

Menaker’s own family was deeply engaged in the life of the local Jewish community and, after she and her two older sisters moved away, both her parents took on prominent roles in Harrisburg life.

Her mother, Miriam, was the first woman elected to public office in the city as a member, and later president, of Harrisburg City Council. The plaza in front of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. City Government Center commemorates her service.

Menaker’s businessman father, Mortimer, served as chair of the Harrisburg Redevelopment Authority. In August 2022, an apartment building on S. 2nd Street was renamed in his honor.

But Menaker doesn’t focus solely on her own role in the Freddy Burton case. She also describes her connection with Jonathan Gettleman, a lawyer who practices in Santa Cruz, Calif., and currently represents Burton.

He inherited that fight from his parents, who first represented Burton and others in an action against the Pennsylvania prison system in 1977 for excessive use of solitary confinement. The Gettlemans became so invested in Freddy’s cause that they made him Jonathan’s godfather.

Reached by phone at his law office, Gettleman said that he’s been “living this case since I was born.” He called Menaker’s book a “fascinating self-study in the growth of consciousness,” and praised how she portrays herself “struggling with very challenging aspects of how a person comes to understand the conditioning that they lived under and gains a broader awareness of other factors that contributed to the culture she came from in which she participated in convicting Mr. Burton, who she now recognizes, with a greater understanding, didn’t do it.”

More than half a century since Freddy Burton, now 76 years old, was incarcerated, he remains imprisoned in the State Correctional Institution at Somerset, with his latest request for appellate review pending before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Neither Menaker nor Gettleman hold out much hope for his eventual release, but Menaker pointed out that, “There are laws that make these things happen, and those laws should be looked at and changed.”

In that effort, Menaker has become a supporter of the organization FAMM (Families Against Mandatory Minimums), a nonprofit that has advocated, among other reforms, for the creation and expansion of compassionate release programs for elderly prisoners like Burton who pose no threat to public safety.

Menaker observed that the experience of writing her book has “made me much more sympathetic and empathetic to African Americans and other people who are marginalized.” Noting the crucial role her own conditioning played in the verdict she’d now reverse if she could, she hopes some readers will say, “Maybe I need to look at myself, too, and understand whether I have any of these biases.”

“The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done: One Juror’s Reckoning With Racial Injustice,” She Writes Press, is slated for release on April 11. For more information on Carol Menaker visit www.carolmenaker.com.

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