The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff: The Redemption of Herbert Nicholls Jr.

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Description

In 1931, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed the sheriff of Asotin, Washington. The incident stunned the small town and a mob threatened to hang him. Both the crime and Herbert Niccolls’s eventual sentence of life imprisonment at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla drew national attention, only to be buried later in local archives.

Journalist Nancy Bartley has conducted extensive research to construct a compelling narrative of the events and characters that make this a unique episode within the history of criminal justice in the USA. Niccolls became a cause for Father Flanagan of Boys Town,who took to the airwaves, imploring listeners to write Governor Hartley at the boy’s behalf. The bitter campaign put Hartley in the sort of negative light that he lost his bid for reelection. Under a new and progressive warden, Niccolls thrived in prison. Inmates like physician Peter Miller and literary agent James Ashe became his tutors, finding that Niccolls had an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Right through the deadly 1934 prison rebellion at Walla Walla, several prisoners kept him from harm.

Niccolls was once after all released from prison in his early twenties. He went to work at 20th Century Fox in Hollywood, where he kept his secret for the remainder of his long life. The Boy Who Shot the Sheriff explores this little-known story of a young boy’s fate within the juvenile justice system Right through the bloodiest years within the nation’s penitentiaries.

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