The group then turned to the U. Supreme Court, which in November overrode the Alabama decisions and granted new trials to all of the defendants. In the process, Powell v. Alabama , as the Supreme Court's ruling was labeled, established a key precedent for enforcing African Americans' right to adequate counsel under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Scottsboro Trial At the state and circuit court levels however, the legal campaign to free the Scottsboro defendants met with repeated frustration and disappointment despite overwhelming evidence of the defendants' innocence. The most persuasive evidence came from one of the accusers herself, Ruby Bates. In the break between the first set of trials and lead defendant Haywood Patterson's second trial, which began in March , Bates recanted her story and agreed to testify for the defense, admitting that Price concocted the story to avoid charges for vagrancy and crossing state lines for "immoral purposes" in violation of the Mann Act.
She later marched in protests and spoke at rallies for the accused. In addition, Samuel Liebowitz, the ILD's non-Communist lead attorney, found numerous inconsistencies in Price's testimony and highlighted the medical examinations of Price and Bates, which refuted the pair's charge of rape. But once more the jury returned a guilty verdict and recommended the death penalty. Then, in an act of incredible courage, Judge James Horton overrode the jury's verdict.
Horton had carefully reviewed the evidence and met privately with one of the medical examiners, who told him he thought the girls were lying. Lawyers for the state, however, continued to pursue the case, this time under a judge sympathetic to the prosecution.
In December , Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris were convicted of rape and sentenced to death for a third time by another all-white jury. Five other defendants remained in prison, awaiting new trials, while the remaining two were removed to juvenile court and later convicted.
Scottsboro Defendants Following this latest round of guilty verdicts, ILD attorneys attempted to bribe Victoria Price in a foolish act of desperation. When the bribe came to light, Liebowitz, whose relationship with the ILD was always tenuous, severed ties with the group and established his own rival defense organization, the American Scottsboro Committee ASC.
The attempted bribe and the departure of Liebowitz marked the beginning of the end for the ILD as the leader of the Scottsboro legal defense. In January of , the U. Supreme Court agreed to review the third convictions of Patterson and Norris. Three months later, the court once again overturned the guilty verdicts and ordered new trials, ruling in Patterson v.
Alabama and Norris v. Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. Alabama that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court overturned the Alabama verdicts, setting an important legal precedent for enforcing the right of African Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to the lower courts.
The second round of trials began in the circuit court in Decatur, Alabama, 50 miles west of Scottsboro, under Judge James Horton. But even with her testimony and evidence from the initial medical examination of the women that refuted the rape charge, another all-white jury convicted the first defendant, Patterson, and recommended the death penalty.
Having reviewed the evidence and met privately with one of the medical examiners, Judge Horton suspended the death sentence and granted Patterson a new trial. The judge would be rewarded for this brave action by losing his bid for reelection the following year.
Prosecutors got the cases in front of a more sympathetic judge, and both Patterson and Norris were retried, convicted and sentenced to death in late Supreme Court. In January , the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v. This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation.
Early in , Patterson was convicted for a fourth time, but sentenced to 75 years in prison. The day after the verdict, Ozie Powell was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff with a knife; both men survived.
Through negotiations with the defense, prosecutors agreed to drop rape charges against Powell, but he was convicted of assaulting the deputy sheriff and sentenced to 20 years. They also dropped rape charges against the four remaining defendants—Montgomery, Roberson, Williams and Leroy Wright—and all four were released. Convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl in , Patterson died of cancer in Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallace of Alabama in , would outlive all of the other Scottsboro Boys, dying in at the age of They whipped me and it seemed like they were going to kill me.
All the time they kept saying, "Now will you tell? I absolutely have no patience with the mob spirit, and that spirit that would charge the guilt or innocense of any being without knowing of their guilt or innocense. Nine black teens in total were arrested for the rape. Some of the defendants were as young as twelve years old.
The initial trials happened quickly, with as little as a day for each trial. The all-white jury deliberated the first case, involving two of the defendants, for less than two hours before finding the defendants guilty. After the initial trials found all but one of the defendants guilty, the case was appealed several times.
The appeals claimed that the all-white jury was biased, the defense lawyers were ineffective, and the sentences were unfair. When the new trials were held, one accuser admitted that she had invented the allegations of rape.
In , the case reached the Alabama Supreme Court, which affirmed seven out of the eight death sentences. After several more appeals the case went before the US Supreme Court, where charges against four of the defendants were dropped. The rest of the defendants either eventually escaped or were released from jail.
The one defendant who had received the death sentence in the final trial violated his parole and went into hiding, and later wrote a book about his experiences after being pardoned by the governor.
The case has become a leading example of the injustice of all-white juries, and has been adapted in many books, plays, and movies.
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