 Pittsburgh Dispatch, March 16, 1911. Andrew Toth was sentenced to death on April 8, 1891, for a murder that occurred during a riot at Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock, Pennsylvania, the previous New Year’s Day. Toth had nothing to do with the crime. It had been committed by a man with the same last name—Steve Toth—who fled the country after the riot, leaving so hurriedly that he did not bother to pick up his belongings at the rooming house where he had been staying. Steve Toth and Andrew Toth were not related and bore little resemblance to one another. The riot occurred when some 200 striking workers of Hungarian descent, seething with anger that strikebreakers of mostly Irish descent were stoking the furnaces on the holiday, marched on the mill with ax handles, shovels, and other makeshift weapons. Three strikebreakers were killed and 16 injured. The Allegheny County sheriff deputized scores of men, who arrested 54 Hungarians—including Andrew Toth. Toth was a devout Christian who had immigrated five years earlier, planning to stay only as long as necessary to save enough money to buy a home for his wife and four sons in the Hungarian town of Abanj. At the time of the riot, Toth’s eagerly anticipated departure had been only weeks away. Six days after the riot, Toth and two other Hungarians, Michael Sabol and George S. Rusnak (also spelled Rusnok and Rusznak), were charged with first-degree murder in connection with one of the riot deaths—that of an Irish furnace boss named Michael Quinn. When the defendants went on trial in the Court of Oyer and Terminer of Allegheny County the following month, the sole evidence against Toth was the testimony of one purported eyewitness of Irish descent, Peter Mullin. Two other eyewitnesses presented by the prosecution did not implicate Toth, attributing the Quinn beating to Sabol and Rusnak. Mullin’s testimony was dubious for two reasons: First, he initially had told authorities that a man named Steve Toth—not Andrew Toth—had administered the fatal beating with Sabol and Rusnak. Second, Mullin claimed that the beating occurred near Furnace C, while the other principal prosecution witnesses—the two who did not implicate Andrew Toth—said it occurred 500 feet away near Furnace A. The Furnace A scenario seemed more logical, since that is where Quinn had fallen. It was not possible that either Mullin or the other eyewitnesses simply erred concerning the location of the beating because, from their respective vantage points, Mullin could not have seen what happened at Furnace A and the others could not have seen what happened at Furnace C. Despite the conflicting testimony, the jury found all three defendants guilty and Judge Edwin H. Stowe sentenced them “to be hanged by the neck until you be dead” at a time and location to be designated by the governor of Pennsylvania. Three months later, on June 5, 1891, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court summarily affirmed the convictions and death sentences with an opinion that merely summarized the issues raised in the condemned men’s pleadings and rejected each with one word: “Refused.”
However, a number of prominent persons—including most notably Andrew Carnegie and the manager of the Thomson mill, Charles M. Schwab—were troubled by the outcome of the case. At the behest of the concerned citizens, Governor Robert Emory Pattison commuted the sentences to life in prison on February 25, 1892.
In December 1894, a man informed police that his acquaintance, Mike Pekar, was actually responsible for the death of Michael Quinn. After investigating, police were convinced of the truth of these statements. It was noted that Pekar bore a very close resemblance to George Rusnak. Shortly thereafter, Michael Sabol was pardoned and released from prison on March 26, 1895. Two weeks after his release, Sabol died of consumption, which he had been afflicted with since the early days of his incarceration. Rusnak obtained a pardon on October 13, 1897. For almost 19 years after the commutation, Toth was a model prisoner at Pennsylvania’s Western Penitentiary, where he prayed with such frequency that he came to be called “Praying Andy.” In December 1910, it seemed that his prayers were answered when, in Hungary, Steve Toth—apparently believing he was near death from typhoid fever—asked to speak to a judicial authority. When a judge was brought to his bedside, the man who had hastily fled Braddock after the riot confessed that he had inflicted the fatal blows upon Quinn. Steve Toth’s confession was presented to the Pennsylvania Pardon Board. After a hearing at which the questionable evidence used at the 1892 trial was dispassionately reexamined for the first time, the board concluded that Andrew Toth was indeed an innocent man. On March 17, 1911, Governor John Kinley Tener granted a full pardon, and within hours Toth walked out of the penitentiary. Meanwhile, Steve Toth had something of a miraculous recovery, prompting demands that he be returned to Allegheny County and tried for murder. Within weeks, however, the notion was rendered moot when he suffered a fatal relapse. The wife whom Andrew Toth had last seen a quarter of a century earlier awaited him in Hungary, but he had no funds for passage—a circumstance that prompted Andrew Carnegie to provide a pension — $40 a month — enabling Toth to go home. The case gave rise to a movement led by, among others, John Henry Wigmore, the distinguished dean of the Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, to establish systems of automatic indemnification for the wrongfully convicted. To Wigmore, a constitutional principle was involved—that compensation should be made for property taken by the state. There was no more precious property, Wigmore reasoned, than freedom. “To deprive a man of liberty, put him to heavy expense in defending himself, and to cut off his power to earn a living—these are sacrifices which the state imposes on him for the public purpose of punishing crime,” Wigmore explained in a 1913 editorial in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. “And when it is found that he incurred these sacrifices through no fault of his own, that he was innocent, then should not the state at least compensate him, so far as money can do so?” The indemnification movement was not immediately successful, however. It was not until three decades after the Toth exoneration that California, in 1941, became the first state to enact legislation to compensate the wrongfully convicted. Wisconsin followed in 1943, Illinois in 1945, North Carolina in 1947, and 10 other states—Iowa, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia—by the end of the Twentieth Century. – Rob Warden
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