Biography
Pedro Antonio Rios was a twenty-two-year-old Puerto Rican sentenced to death in New York after an April 1954 felony-murder conviction. He and his co-defendants repudiated confessions they said police had coerced, and their defenders challenged the evidence and jury selection. Governor Averell Harriman stayed Rios’s execution in February 1955 after state psychiatrists found him mentally ill. His later custody outcome remains unresolved.
