Chronology of the case of Ameer Ben Ali
Compiled by Sarah Oh
Copyright © 2006, Center on Wrongful Convictions
Bluhm Legal Clinic, Northwestern University School of Law
April 23, 1891 — Carrie Brown, a sixty-year-old prostitute, arrives with a younger man at the East River Hotel, an East-side New York City lodging house, in the late evening. They check into a corner room on the top floor.
April 24, 1891 — A room clerk discovers Brown’s strangled and mutilated body while conducting a routine morning room check. Police arrest Ameer Ben Ali as a material witness. Ben Ali, an Algerian who used the name George Frank, was not the man believed to have checked into the hotel with Brown but rather occupied a room across the hall.
April 26, 1891 — New York Chief of Detectives Thomas F. Byrnes issues a “general alarm” for the arrest of “a man about five feet nine inches high, about thirty-one years old, light hair and mustache, speaks broken English.”
April 30, 1891 — Barnes announces that “circumstantial facts” implicate George Frank (alias Ben Ali) in the crime.
May 2, 1891 — Ben Ali denies guilt.
May 18, 1891 — A grand jury indicts Ben Ali for Brown’s murder.
June 24, 1891 — Ben Ali’s trial begins. The prosecution reveals that the principal evidence against Ben Ali is a trail of blood leading from Brown’s room across the hall to his room.
July 3, 1891 — Ben Ali is convicted of second degree murder.
July 10, 1891 — Ben Ali is sentenced to life in prison.
July 13, 1891 — Ben Ali seeks a pardon from Governor Roswell P. Flower based two affidavits. One is from journalist Jacob Riis, of the New York Sun, who had arrived at the scene of the crime shortly after it was discovered. The Riis affidavit states that there had been no trail of blood leading from Brown’s room to Ben Ali’s room. The other affidavit is from George Damon, a Crawford, New Jersey, man, stating that shortly after the crime a Danish servant in his employ disappeared, presumably leaving the country, shortly after the crime. In the man’s room, Damon says he found blood-stained clothing and a key from the East River Hotel.
April 16, 1891 — New York Governor Benjamin B. Odell pardons Ben Ali.
April 22, 1901 — Ben Ali is released from Matteawan State Hospital for Insane Convicts at Dannemora after serving nearly eleven years of a life sentence.
