Mr.
Thrower’s unusual legal background — as a federal tax law expert and a
lawyer for death row inmates in Georgia, most of them black, in the Jim
Crow era — helped garner wide support from lawyers’ groups and lawmakers
when Nixon nominated him for I.R.S. commissioner.
And
though his tenure was short, he was instrumental in two historic
overhauls of American tax policy: revoking the tax-exempt status of
private schools that excluded blacks, and passage of the Tax Reform Act
of 1969, which he helped draft. The legislation eliminated some
loopholes for the rich and exempted many poor people from federal taxes
altogether.
But
it was not Watergate that haunted Mr. Thrower; it was the case of Will
Coxson, a black teenager convicted in the late 1930s of raping a white
woman in Marietta, Ga., and sentenced to die. Mr. Thrower took the case
on appeal in 1940 and discovered that Mr. Coxson’s alibi was solid and
that the victim’s initial description of her attacker as “a
light-skinned black man” had changed significantly when the prosecution
brought the case to trial. Mr. Coxson was dark-skinned.
The
Georgia Supreme Court ordered a hearing on whether Mr. Coxson had
received adequate representation, and Mr. Thrower was preparing for that
when he left to join the Marines. Turning the case over to another
lawyer, he said, he felt sure that the evidence would sustain an appeal
all the way to the United States Supreme Court if necessary and win Mr.
Coxson’s freedom. But the case “withered on the vine,” he said, and
while Mr. Thrower was serving in the Pacific, Mr. Coxson was executed.
“For
the past 60 years, no case has kept me awake at night as much as this,”
he said in a 2001 lecture, “wondering what else I might have done to
save the life of this young man. His life should not have been taken.”
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