The Todal
2013-04-05 13:03:14 UTC
Raises interesting points - the burden of proof in a rape case, the risk
to jurors when they are identified and put under pressure to reach a
particular verdict, and why it is totally wrong to elect judges and
thereby punish them with deselection if the verdict is unpopular with
the rednecks...
Oh and whether this story really is best told in the form of a new
musical to be shown in a London theatre! I'm sceptical.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/04/scottsboro-boys-pardon-alabama-senate-house?INTCMP=SRCH
Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young
black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious
miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of
raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry
mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up
serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.
snip
Paradoxically, the Scottsboro Nine had nothing to do with Scottsboro. On
the night of 25 March 1931 the boys – the youngest 12, the oldest 19 –
were hoboing on a freight train heading west to Memphis, Tennessee, when
some of them got into a fight with a group of white youths. The white
boys jumped off the train as it passed through the Scottsboro area and
complained to the local sheriff that they had been attacked, and with
that one dubious claim Southern justice cranked into motion.
By the time the train reached the next stop a posse of armed local white
men had formed and the group went from carriage to carriage, arresting
all the blacks they could find. As they were searching the train, they
also came across two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
It's hard from the distance of 80 years to appreciate fully what it
meant for white women to be found even in the vicinity of black men in
1931. Any physical contact, however remote, was taboo.
That taboo probably explains why one of the women, Price, invented the
story that she and Bates had been gang raped – it was a ruse to avoid
any risk of being jailed overnight herself. For the black young men
accused of raping the two white woman, the risk was of a different
magnitude. In the 1930s Deep South it meant only one thing: death. As
the Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher put it, if a white woman swears
that a black man even tried to rape her, "we see to it that the Negro is
executed".
snip
They were put on trial 12 days after their arrest, having met their two
defence lawyers – one of whom hadn't defended a case in years, while the
other was a specialist in real estate law – just half an hour before the
trial opened.
snip
Judge Horton carried out one of the great heroic acts of the Jim Crow
period – an act that preceded the heroism of Rosa Parks on the bus by 22
years. After the jury returned with an unanimous "guilty" for Haywood
Patterson – despite the fact that by then Ruby Bates had admitted in
court that the rape was a fabrication – Horton announced that he was
setting aside the verdict and indefinitely postponing all further
retrials on the grounds that a fair hearing was impossible. His
extraordinary courage in the face of extreme local hostility was repaid
the following year when he was roundly defeated at the ballot box and
thrown out of his job.
Despite the outstanding bravery of Judge Horton – and of the team of
liberal lawyers led by a New York attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, and backed
by the American Communist party, who endured countless death threats in
the attempt to secure the boys a proper defence, the intensity of
prejudice in Alabama was just too powerful to resist. The boys all spent
long years in prison, the last one to be released emerging as late as
1950. One, Ozie Powell, was shot while in jail and permanently brain
damaged. Only one – Clarence Norris – was pardoned when alive, in 1976.
to jurors when they are identified and put under pressure to reach a
particular verdict, and why it is totally wrong to elect judges and
thereby punish them with deselection if the verdict is unpopular with
the rednecks...
Oh and whether this story really is best told in the form of a new
musical to be shown in a London theatre! I'm sceptical.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/04/scottsboro-boys-pardon-alabama-senate-house?INTCMP=SRCH
Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young
black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious
miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of
raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry
mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up
serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.
snip
Paradoxically, the Scottsboro Nine had nothing to do with Scottsboro. On
the night of 25 March 1931 the boys – the youngest 12, the oldest 19 –
were hoboing on a freight train heading west to Memphis, Tennessee, when
some of them got into a fight with a group of white youths. The white
boys jumped off the train as it passed through the Scottsboro area and
complained to the local sheriff that they had been attacked, and with
that one dubious claim Southern justice cranked into motion.
By the time the train reached the next stop a posse of armed local white
men had formed and the group went from carriage to carriage, arresting
all the blacks they could find. As they were searching the train, they
also came across two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
It's hard from the distance of 80 years to appreciate fully what it
meant for white women to be found even in the vicinity of black men in
1931. Any physical contact, however remote, was taboo.
That taboo probably explains why one of the women, Price, invented the
story that she and Bates had been gang raped – it was a ruse to avoid
any risk of being jailed overnight herself. For the black young men
accused of raping the two white woman, the risk was of a different
magnitude. In the 1930s Deep South it meant only one thing: death. As
the Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher put it, if a white woman swears
that a black man even tried to rape her, "we see to it that the Negro is
executed".
snip
They were put on trial 12 days after their arrest, having met their two
defence lawyers – one of whom hadn't defended a case in years, while the
other was a specialist in real estate law – just half an hour before the
trial opened.
snip
Judge Horton carried out one of the great heroic acts of the Jim Crow
period – an act that preceded the heroism of Rosa Parks on the bus by 22
years. After the jury returned with an unanimous "guilty" for Haywood
Patterson – despite the fact that by then Ruby Bates had admitted in
court that the rape was a fabrication – Horton announced that he was
setting aside the verdict and indefinitely postponing all further
retrials on the grounds that a fair hearing was impossible. His
extraordinary courage in the face of extreme local hostility was repaid
the following year when he was roundly defeated at the ballot box and
thrown out of his job.
Despite the outstanding bravery of Judge Horton – and of the team of
liberal lawyers led by a New York attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, and backed
by the American Communist party, who endured countless death threats in
the attempt to secure the boys a proper defence, the intensity of
prejudice in Alabama was just too powerful to resist. The boys all spent
long years in prison, the last one to be released emerging as late as
1950. One, Ozie Powell, was shot while in jail and permanently brain
damaged. Only one – Clarence Norris – was pardoned when alive, in 1976.