The youths received no competent counsel. They were represented by Stephen Roddy, a lawyer from Tennessee who was there at the request of friends of the boys' parents (and unfamiliar with Alabama law) and the public defender, Milo Moody, a 69-year-old lawyer who hadn't practiced in years.
Thomas Knight, Jr.The prosecutor in the retrials was Alabama's newly elected attorney general, Thomas Knight, Jr. Knight's father, Thomas Knight, Sr., had authored the Alabama Supreme Court decision upholding the original convictions. The ILD selected two attorneys to represent the Scottsboro Boys in the retrials.
When New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz receieved a call from the International Labor Defense asking him whether he would defend the Scottsboro Boys in their new trials, he was considered by many to be the "new Clarence Darrow," the man to call if you were charged with a capital crime.
The heroism of Judge James Horton and the "Scottsboro Boys" trial that brought him fame have receded from public memory. The central characters of the legal battle are all dead. The two women whose accusation of rape against nine black teenagers started it all died in the early 1980's.
Horton grants Patterson a new trial The defense moved for a retrial and, believing the defendants innocent, Judge James Edwin Horton agreed to set aside the guilty verdict for Patterson.
Inside, Leibowitz called each to the stand in turn. Each denied having ever touched Victoria Price or Ruby Bates. The last to take the stand was Haywood Patterson.
James Edwin Horton Jr. was born in Tennessee in 1878, the son of a former slave owner. He studied medicine at Vanderbilt for a year and then received a B.A. and Bachelor of Law at Cumberland University, in 1897 and 1899. His father was a probate judge and Horton clerked for him before entering private practice.
15 yearsMr. Norris, who was sentenced to death three times in a series of trials involving nine black teen-agers accused of raping two white women, spent 15 years in prison. He was then a fugitive for 30 years after he violated his parole and fled Alabama.
Victoria Price Street, whose charge that she was raped by a group of young blacks on a train prompted the Scottsboro Boys trial of the 1930's, has died in Huntsville Hospital. She was 77 years old. Mrs. Street was a resident of Fayetteville, Tenn., in the last years of her life.
In the first set of trials in April 1931, an all-white, all-male jury quickly convicted the Scottsboro Boys and sentenced eight of them to death. The trial of the youngest, 13-year-old Leroy Wright, ended in a hung jury when one juror favored life imprisonment rather than death.
Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, two white women who were also riding the freight train, faced charges of vagrancy and illegal sexual activity. In order to avoid these charges, they falsely accused the Scottsboro Boys of rape.
He wrote a book about his experience, Scottsboro Boy. Patterson was in his late teens when he and eight other young black boys were accused of raping two white women on a train in 1931. Patterson was given the death sentence three times, but after appeals and retrials he was eventually sentenced to 75 years in prison.