Joseph Arridy (/ˈærɪdi/; April 29, 1915 – January 6, 1939)[1][2] was an American man who was falsely convicted and wrongfully executed for the 1936 rape and murder of Dorothy Drain, a 15-year-old girl in Pueblo, Colorado.

Arridy did not socialize with other children in his neighborhood, instead preferring to wander town, hammer nails, and make mud pies, a habit he kept up into his mid-teens.

In October of the same year, Arridy was admitted at the age of ten to the State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Examiners at the home also had Arridy's family undergo several psychological tests and concluded that his mother Mary was "probably feeble-minded" and his younger brother George considered a "high moron".

The probation officer misrepresented the rape as consensual, citing the same-sex and interracial nature of the assault as evidence that Arridy posed a moral danger to society.

[8][9] On August 8, 1936, 21-year-old Arridy, along with at least four other young men, left the school grounds and, mimicking the behaviour of train-hopping laborers in the nearby railyards, he stowed away in freight carts and traveled through Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.

An intruder entered the house through the unlocked front door and bludgeoned 15-year-old Dorothy and her 12-year-old sister Barbara Drain with a bladed weapon, believed to be the blunt side of a hatchet.

[14][15] A fellow runaway from the school, Ben Harvey, would later tell workers that he and Arridy had passed through Pueblo only once, in the late hours of August 16, to visit his family in Bessemer, unaware that they had moved to a different part of town, and getting on a train to Denver shortly after.

[18][19][20] After several weeks of train-hopping, Arridy arrived in Cheyenne, Wyoming on August 20 at noon and not long after, he walked up to a kitchen car and asked the workers for food.

The three-room apartment Aguilar shared with his mother, wife, and children was searched by police, with investigators finding an axe head with notches matching the wounds inflicted on both Drain girls, as well as a calendar with the date August 15 marked, with photographs of nude women and newspaper clippings containing articles about "sex slayings" taped to the surrounding wallpaper.

[23][34] Shortly before his execution, Aguilar was also connected to a murder that occurred earlier on August 2 at a home only three blocks away from the Drain residence, when he bludgeoned 72-year-old Sally Crumply, as well as her 48-year-old niece Lilly McMurtree and four-year-old grandson Burton Beach, who survived the attack,[22] and a third undisclosed murder that occurred in 1934; McMurtree's son Floyd had been held in a mental asylum after being wrongly accused.

[35][36][37] Aguilar had been already arrested on August 16 when he attended Dorothy Drain's funeral, after he attracted the attention of law enforcement for being dressed in work overalls, cutting in line twice to see the casket and forcefully handing the deceased's father 25 cents in nickels "to help the family".

Seavy brought up that Aguilar's brother had been confined to a mental asylum before he was deported back to Mexico and claimed that Arridy had privately confessed to him that he acted alone.

[43] When the case was finally taken to trial on February 8, 1937, Arridy's lawyer C. Fred Barnard pleaded insanity to avoid the death penalty for his client.

[22] Judge Harry Leddy ruled Arridy to be sane,[50] while acknowledged by three state psychiatrists to be so mentally limited as to be classified as an "imbecile", a medical term at the time.

[8][22] On April 17, a jury convicted Arridy of the murder, largely due to his false confession and sentenced to death, with the execution date set for May of the same year.

In the days after the trial, Benjamin Jefferson, who had read a statement corroborating the psychiatrists' findings in court, gave a speech to the press and used the example of Joe Arridy to advocate for eugenics, stating that his "imbecility" was the result of a "diseased germ plasma that was never allowed to unfold" and made a public plea to Colorado legislation to pass a law that would mandate the sterilization of "imbeciles", i.e. individuals with an IQ below 50.

One of them, Leonard Schwinn, abbot of Holy Cross Abbey, called the sentence into question in a written statement to the governor, saying "I don't think the state ought to be executing children".

[58][59][60] During the appeals process, Arridy was held alongside three other condemned men: Angelo Agnes, Pietro "Pete Catalina" Catalano, and Norman Wharton.

[62] On November 4, 1938, as part of a nationwide petition put forth by attorneys Emmett Thurman and William O. Perry, a request was made for one or both of Arridy's eyes to be removed before execution for organ donation.

[63] They represented fellow lawyer and Republican Colorado State Legislature candidate William Lewis, who was left blind following an accident when a tear gas grenade exploded in his hand, and hoped that Lewis could receive a second cornea transplant in this manner; a post-mortem extraction was considered infeasible due to concerns over damage to the lens by the cyanide gas used in the execution chamber.

Attorney General Byron G. Rogers said that voluntary cornea donation of a death row prisoner would be within Colorado law, citing the example of John Deering in Utah a month earlier, but Arridy denied the request, his reasoning being quoted as "You are not going to kill me and I need my eye".

Thurman and Perry, however, appealed to Rogers to have Arridy convinced to the cornea donation, as he was, at the time, scheduled to be executed the earliest of the inmates, the date having been set for November 20.

[71][77][78] On the morning of January 6, 1939, just a few hours before his execution that same evening, Arridy received an unscheduled final visitation from his family, consisting of his mother and sister, as well as an aunt and a cousin, which had been arranged as a surprise by Warden Best.

[80][f] Barring this, Arridy stayed silent for the duration of the visit and remained expressionless, except for a "slight smile" when fellow inmates brought in a three-gallon bucket of ice cream for the family to eat.

After having his last rites and sitting down inside the chamber, Arridy's smile momentarily faded when he was blindfolded for the execution, but calmed down when the warden grabbed his hand and reassured him.

[74][75] The remaining death row inmate, Norman Wharton, convicted for the 1938 murder of security guard Arthur C. "Jack" Latting at The Broadmoor hotel during a botched robbery, received a pardon around 1948.

Despite numerous written pleas and a clean record with noted good behavior, George was never paroled due to concerns that his release might attract negative press attention, given the infamy of his brother.

A group of supporters formed the non-profit Friends of Joe Arridy and worked to bring new recognition to the injustice of his case, in addition to commissioning a tombstone for his grave in 2007.

"[3][4][107] In June 2007, about 50 supporters of Arridy gathered for the dedication of a tombstone they had commissioned for his grave at Woodpecker Hill in Cañon City's Greenwood Cemetery near the state prison.