On March 25, 1932, the United States Supreme Court hands
down its decision in the case of Powell v. Alabama. The case arose out
of the infamous Scottsboro case. Nine young black men were arrested and accused
of raping two white women on train in Alabama in March 1931. The boys were
fortunate to barely escape a lynch mob sent to kill them, but were railroaded
into convictions and death sentences. The Supreme Court overturned the
convictions on the basis that they did not have effective representation. Victoria
Price and Ruby Bates, the alleged victims, were not the virtuous women that the
white establishment in Alabama had tried to portray. In fact, both were
prostitutes who had invented the charges out of thin air. Bates eventually
recanted her testimony. The accused boys were not given lawyers until the
morning of the trial and these attorneys made almost no effort to defend their
clients. On the same day that the case began, the defendants were convicted and
received death sentences. The blatant unfairness of the case attracted the
attention of liberals across the country. The transcript of the trial left the
Supreme Court with no other choice but to throw out the convictions. Still,
Alabama insisted on retrying the defendants. This time, Samuel Liebowitz, one
of the premier defense attorneys of the day, came to represent the Scottsboro
nine. It didn't matter. The jury made up of all white men, convicted them all again.
In fact, there would be many more trials of the Scottsboro defendants over the
years and each time they were convicted, the convictions were over turned on
appeal. When the saga finally ended in 1937, four of the defendants were
released without any further trials, while the five remaining defendants were
convicted again and sentenced to long prison terms. All them were eventually
released or pardoned for the original rape offenses, but several were arrested for
unrelated crimes and served many more years in jail.
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