The Scottsboro Trial

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At best, the accused were lucky not to be lynched without a trial. So the Scottsboro Boys started off at a great handicap when two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, (who, later withdrew her accusation) chose to accuse them of rape while riding a freight and gravel carrying train from Tennessee to Alabama.
At the first trial of the Scottsboro Boys that started on April 6, 1931, just 12 days after their arrest, the local newspapers had already arrived at their "guilty" conclusions. One headline in the Jackson County Sentinel read: "All Negroes positively identified by girls and one white boy who was held prisoner with pistol and knives while nine black fiends committed revolting crime." (Linder, "Without Fear or Favor..") The same newspaper also reported that the two girls were in "a terrible condition mentally and physically after their unspeakable experience at the hands of the black brutes," although it was clearly brought out during the trial that the girls were ...

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were presented as witnesses by the defense, and they proceeded to give rambling, incoherent performances that damaged rather than helped their cause. The defense attorneys offered no closing argument either. Despite these glaring demonstrations of incompetence (it would be inaccurate to call them just "mistakes") the verdict of the "all white" jury would hardly have been different. This is proven by the fact that the jury sentenced the 12-year-old defendant Roy Wright to death despite having been requested for a life sentence by the prosecution! Also, in the retrial of the Scottsboro Boys two years later, the jury returned the same "guilty" verdict even when they were defended by one ...

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