Thread by @herandrews

Interesting piece on the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys, who, apparently, in his earlier career as a New York defense attorney, won acquittals for many clearly guilty people including Al Capone. But the article repeats some common misconceptions about the Scottsboro case itself.

It is usually said the Alabama jury convicted the nine solely on the word of Victoria Price, who claimed she was hoboing on a freight train with Ruby Bates when a dozen black boys climbed in from another train car, threw some white boys out of the moving gondola, and raped them.

But the prosecution had more than that. Multiple eyewitnesses along the train route saw the fight in the gondola car. One farmer saw the ejected white boys walking down the track, faces bloody. Another saw into the gondola for a second just as a black figure threw a woman down.

Orville Gilley was one of the white boys in the gondola car. He escaped being thrown off the moving train because by the time they got to him the train had sped up to 45mph. He backed up Price. “Undoubtedly the strongest corroborative evidence the state could have produced.”

A knife that belonged to Victoria Price was found in the possession of one of the defendants during his arrest. According to the arresting deputy, "He said he took it off the white girl Victoria Price."

You might not put much stock in this, but many of the defendants implicated each other in the first trial, claiming they'd witnessed the rape but not participated. "That, as much as the testimony of Price and Bates, led to their conviction," one sympathizer later wrote.

Ruby Bates told a doctor who treated her for syphilis that she got it from the rape on the train.

It's true Ruby Bates later recanted, telling the second trial that her testimony in the first one had been false. But the Tablet article doesn't mention that her revised testimony was actually damaging to the defense because it was obvious to everyone that she'd been bribed.

Bates was so unconvincing that, when people asked the prosecutor if he would go after her for perjury, he said, “She is making me such a damn good witness I prefer to leave her on the ground.” The defense lawyer later all but admitted her testimony had been bought.

The defense was caught red-handed trying to bribe witnesses several times. These two lawyers, David Shriftman and Sol Kone, were caught with $1,500 in a briefcase. They were released on bond and fled never to be seen again.

Oddly, the examining doctor at Scottsboro also changed his testimony: First he said the girls were “loaded with male sperm”; later he said he found only a little and it was all non-motile, meaning the girls must have had sex days earlier, not on the train.

The main tactic of the defense was to impugn the character of the girls. (Any comment from the #MeToo movement on these quotes?)

Judge James E. Horton threw out Heywood Patterson's conviction on the grounds that, if she’d actually been raped, Victoria Price should have had more wounds on her body and been more agitated during the medical examination.

Horton: “History, sacred and profane, and the common experience of mankind teach us that women of the character shown in this case are prone for selfish reasons to make false accusations both of rape and of insult upon the slightest provocation or even without provocation.”

This quote from one of the prosecutors, referring to the bribed witnesses, is indeed bad. The Alabama judge reprimanded him for uttering it. But there are other quotes the author of the Tablet article doesn't cite.

Prosecutor Thomas Knight: "I do not want a verdict based on racial prejudice or a religious creed. I want a verdict based on the merits of this case."

Judge Callahan: “Something has been said about the defendant’s being a Negro. I would be ashamed of you if that entered into your consideration in this case. No man is worthy to be in the jury box that would reach the guilt or innocence of a man on any such contemptible grounds”

It’s fine to believe that there was reasonable doubt and the boys should not have been convicted. But it is false to say there was “no evidence” or that the whole thing was a frame-up from beginning to end.

If you want to know more about the Scottsboro trial, the Communist-directed international outcry (similar to Sacco & Vanzetti just five years earlier), the best book is Stories of Scottsboro (1994) by James Goodman. amazon.com/Stories-Scotts…

P.S. Since the Tablet article makes such a point of Liebowitz being streetwise, I must highlight this funny exchange where the Alabama judge has to supply Liebowitz with the right vocabulary to ask about Price’s snuff habit. “‘Dip’ is the word you will have to use.”