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One of the most interesting, crazy, incredible cases of American jurisprudence deals with Scottsboro. Again, you can’t understand unless you’ve got the context of the Great Depression. You have folks riding the rails looking for work just because they can’t afford to… ‘you know I’ll go find this job here…’ So they’re just hopping on a train and riding in, trying to find work wherever they can find work. Well, what happens in the Scottsboro case is you have nine black teenagers and some of them get in a fight on the train with a couple of white guys. The train stops in Scottsboro, you know, because this fight has broken out. As they’re getting off the train, as the Sherriff’s folks are there, the white guys get off, the black guys get off. And then two white women get off. And the townsfolk are looking around going ‘oh…’. And the white women because you’ve got black guys and white women in Alabama in the early 1930’s, I believe 1932. It’s like, whoa… And the women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, yell ‘Rape!’ and say that these nine black teenagers raped them. The town immediately -phow- took the nine kids, hauled them in jail. There was a one day trial for these nine kids that ranged from the age of like twelve or thirteen to seventeen, known as the Scottsboro Boys. In this trial, Victoria Price described a horrific rape. Well the problem was, was that the doctor who had examined these women, said, ‘umm, there’s no evidence of rape here.’ But that didn’t stop the jury. The doctor now didn’t testify that there was no evidence of rape. But it was very clear that he knew there was no evidence of rape. And he had told folks there’s no evidence of rape. These nine black teenagers were convicted, and rape was an executable offence in the 1930’s. And so in a one day trial, 8 of them were sentenced to die in the electric chair. The youngest was sentenced to life imprisonment in an Alabama prison. Now, there are multiple problems with that story. One, Ruby Bates, one of the women who had yelled rape, recanted, said 'It didn’t happen. Now let me tell you what really happened here. We're prostitutes, and the Mann Act, the federal Mann Act, says that we were afraid of getting, says you can’t cross State lines for immoral purposes. And since we crossed over out of Tennessee into Alabama we were afraid that we might get brought up on federal charges, so, we were just trying to protect ourselves, and so we just said, whoa, rape.' Another part of the problem was that first the Communist Party’s legal wing hopped in there and took this case up to the Supreme Court to try to protect the Scottsboro Boys.
Then the NAACP hopped in it.
But one of - a major Supreme court decision was the Powell v. Alabama decision that came after this. Because, think about this. You're on trial for your very life - for a crime that never happened.
Your court-appointed attorneys, one is the town drunk. I believe, at the time, he may have had a blood-alcohol-level of 0.2. I mean, lit. The other attorney, in a capital case, is probably in about the fourth stages of senility. So one of your attorneys is senile, looking for butterflies, and the other one is drunk, seeing butterflies.
Now, the Supreme Court, even the Supreme Court in the 1930's went: "Really? No, come on. You- Come on. This is just too much, even for us." And they remanded the case, they kicked the case back down to Alabama. "You got to try these fellas again."
Well what happens now that they've got a real legal team, is that they began to construct the train, and found out, that many of the Scottsboro boys weren't even on the- in the same car as the women. So how can a rape happen? If the guys aren't in that car?
They were convicted, once again. Case goes back up to the Supreme Court. By the time there- there were so many egregious constitutional errors in this case, that by the time the Scottsboro case is done, and eventually they start getting let out, one by one by one by one, it took, first, eighteen years for the last one.
Imagine: being in prison, in an Alabama prison. You are seventeen. You get out when you're thirty-five. For a crime that never happened; a crime where one of the women has recanted; a crime where the evidence demonstrates that it- you, you couldn't have done this thing. This would be called, hm, an egregious wrong.
You also had several who had escaped. Imagine trying to escape from a Alabama chain gang. But they managed to get out. Michigan refused- they, Alabama tracked one down up into Michigan. Michigan refused- now think about this, a state refusing to extradite a "convicted felon" back to Alabama, 'cause Michigan looked up and said, "Psh, this is wrong. This is just wrong."
The last one was pardoned by Governor George Wallace, sometime I believe, in the 1980's. So imagine again, basically living in the shadows, for almost fourty-fifty years. Because of something that never happened: the charge of rape.
I mean, Scottsboro speaks to so much in the criminal justice system. But what you also get in this, is a series of Supreme Court decisions dealing with the right to competent counsel. Thank God. And, the- the right to have a jury that is really, truly a jury of your peers. Now, that is some amazing jurisprudence that is coming out of this case of horrific, egregious, um unjustifiable, I have no more words for what happened at Scottsboro, um, but an egregious wrong, that in my eyes, has never been righted.
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