in 1825 and kept in Cannon's home before being moved to Johnson's tavern. She was held there for five months until she was shipped south with a large lot of kidnapped free blacks being sold into slavery. Prosecution and conviction The gang was initially indicted in May 1822. Joe Johnson was sentenced to the pillory and 39 lashes; records show the sentence was carried out. Cannon and several other gang members, though charged with Johnson, apparently were not prosecuted. In the mid-1820s, Mayor Joseph Watson of Philadelphia and Governor John Andrew Schulze cooperated to retrieve kidnapped young blacks from Mississippi and to prosecute the Cannon–Johnson gang. In 1826 Watson offered a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest of members, and Schulze issued orders of extradition to the states of Virginia, Alabama and Mississippi. That year they aided most of the young free blacks kidnapped and sold in Mississippi the year before to gain freedom and return to Philadelphia. At least one had died of a beating. In 1827, after Cornelius Sinclair had been freed from slavery in Alabama, he was among witnesses to testify against Henry Carr and John Purnell (alias "John Smith"), two members of the gang who were prosecuted for kidnapping free blacks. They were acquitted in Mayor's Court, and Carr left for Alabama, where he died in 1828. Purnell was also tried in the Philadelphia County Court, where he was convicted in Philadelphia on two counts of kidnapping, and sentenced to a $4000 fine and 42 years in prison. He died five years later while incarcerated in Walnut Street Prison in the city. In 1829, bodies of four black people, including three children, were discovered buried on farm property which Cannon owned in Delaware. A tenant farmer uncovered their remains during plowing. In April 1829, Patty Cannon was indicted on four counts of murder by a grand jury of 24 white males: an infant female on April 26, 1822 a male child on April 26, 1822 an adult male on October 1, 1820 a "Negro boy" on June 1, 1824, The indictments were signed by James Rogers, the Attorney General of Delaware. Witness Cyrus James stated he saw Cannon take an injured "black child not yet dead out in her apron, but that it never returned." James, a mixed-race (mulatto) man, had been purchased as a slave by Cannon when he was only seven years