Gathering support from the mothers of the boys, the ILD convinced the nine young men to choose them as their legal representatives. While appeals were filed, the Alabama Supreme Court issued indefinite stays of executions 72 hours before the defendants were scheduled to die. With July 10 set as the execution date, the ILD sprang into action and managed to secure a stay of execution until the cases could be reviewed by the Alabama Supreme Court. The ILD retained attorneys George W. Chamlee, who filed the first motions, and Joseph Brodsky.
Joseph Brodsky, argued that the remaining defendants had been unfairly judged because there were no Blacks on the jury, but the court ruled that the state had the right “to fix qualifications for jurors.” Chamlee moved for new trials for all defendants. The ILD lawyers asked the Alabama Supreme Court to overturn the verdicts on several grounds. It granted thirteen Eugene Williams a new trial, as he was a minor at the time of his conviction. The reaction to the convictions was swift and large scale.
Just one day after the death sentences were handed down, the first big demonstration was held at St.Luke's Hall in Harlem. The ILD would later clash with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) over the representation of the youngsters. The NAACP, reacted slowly to the case because of initial doubts about the defendants' innocence. For their part, Alabama officials defended the verdicts and wanted no interference by either outside organization in what they considered a local affair.
Letters streamed in from people—Communists and non-Communists, White and Black—protesting the guilty verdicts. In January 1932, accuser Ruby Bates wrote a letter in which she denied that she had been raped. But in March 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the defendants. Rejecting the NAACP’s help, the ILD engaged Walter Pollak, who had represented the ACLU before the U.S. Supreme Court, to argue for them. On November 7, the Supreme Court sided with Pollak in Powell v. Alabama.
In the process, Powell v. Alabama, as the Supreme Court's ruling was labeled, established a key precedent for enforcing African Americans' rights. The Court reversal of the decision was due to a practice that violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court overturned the Alabama verdicts, setting an important legal precedent for enforcing the right of Black Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to Judge Hawkins for a retrial.
He granted the request for a change of venue, and the case was moved to the small, rural community of Decatur. The second trail opened in Decatur, AL with Judge James E. Horton presided. Horton convened the trial for Haywood Patterson on March 27, 1933. The ILD quieted skeptics by asking Samuel Leibowitz—a New York lawyer to serve as the lead defense attorney. Leibowitz was a New York criminal attorney who had secured an astonishing record of seventy-seven acquittals and one hung jury in seventy-eight murder trials.
The prosecutor in the retrials was Alabama's newly elected attorney general, Thomas Knight Jr. Liebowitz was often described as "the next Clarence Darrow." He would put four years of work into the Scottsboro defense--without pay. This was a fight he believed in. Also to quash the indictment against the boys on the grounds that there had been no Blacks on the first jury. To show that the county was conducting an unfair trial by denying Blacks a place on the jury, Liebowitz called up Black leaders from Decatur to testify to the capability of Blacks to serve on the jury.
The support for the boys overseas was dramatic. Demonstrations were held in Dresden, Leipzip and Berlin, Germany as soon as the verdicts came in. An international collection of intellectuals and scientist, including Albert Einstein, signed an petition demanding the release of the nine young men. Eventually, supporters would be joined by one of the alleged victims, Ruby Bates, who visited the Washington, D.C office of the AFRO-AMERICAN newspaper, where she denied that she had been raped by the young men.
Ruby Bates was a surprise witness who came in to testify for the defense that she had NOT been raped by the defendants. The prosecution attacked her credibility by revealing that her clothes had been bought by the Communist Party, thus implying that her testimony had been bought as well. The prosecution also painted Leibowitz as an untrustworthy outsider because of his Jewish faith and northern roots. Despite a lack of evidence, on April 9, 1933, the all-male, all-White jury returned an unanimous verdict of guilty and recommended Haywood Patterson, the death penalty.
A week later on April 17, 1933, the trial judge, James Horton, set aside the verdict on the grounds that he did not believe the defendant committed the crime and granted Patterson a new trail. That decision caused him to be defeated in the next election. In Decatur starting in November 1933, Alabama’s Attorney General Thomas E. Knight, Jr. tried the cases for the third time. This time, the cases were before Judge William Callahan, a known White supremacist, in an action thought to be engineered by Knight.
All-White, all-male juries convicted all nine again and sentenced them to death. Defense attorneys for the nine appealed the cases to the Alabama Supreme Court, which included Knight’s father, Thomas E. Knight Sr., where the court upheld the convictions in June 1934. The state then retried Clarence Norris to see if the Supreme Court would again intervene. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in June 1934. Norris was sentenced to death. But, on April 1, 1935, the United States Supreme Court sent the cases back a second time for retrials in Alabama.
For a second time in April 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. The U.S. Supreme Court (Norris v. Alabama) overturned this conviction, ruling that the state had excluded Blacks from juries. This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation. But it brought neither vindication nor freedom, it had simply won them the right to be retried. The case is overturned and sent to a lower court. The NAACP and other civil rights groups joined the ILD that year to form the Scottsboro Defense Committee, which reorganized the defense effort for the next set of retrials.
However, Patterson's case is not included in the argument because of filing date technicalities. The Supreme Court suggests that lower courts review Patterson's case. On January 23, 1936 Alabama again tried and convicted Haywood Patterson for the fourth time, this time sentencing him to 75 years in prison rather than the death penalty the prosecution had hoped for. For the first time in state history, a Black man had escaped the death penalty after being convicted of raping a White woman.
The Final Decisions
January 23, 1936, Haywood Patterson was convicted of rape and sentenced to 75 years.
On July 15, 1937, Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sexual assault and sentenced to death.
July 22, 1937, Andrew Wright was convicted of rape and sentenced to 99 years. Charlie Weems was to get 75 years.
July 24, 1937, Ozie Powell was sentenced to 20 years as part of his plea bargain after he was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff with a knife. The state dropped the rape charges.
In July 1937, the charges against Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell and Eugene Williams (as well as Roy Wright) were finally dismissed. The State Attorney announced that the prosecution was “convinced they were not guilty.” The four had spent over six years in prison on death row, as "adults" despite their ages. The other four Scottsboro Boys – Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems and Haywood Patterson – remained in prison, having been labeled by the prosecution as the ringleaders of the alleged assault on Bates and Price.
In 1943 and 1944, Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were paroled. In 1948, Haywood Patterson escaped from prison, though he was arrested again and died in prison shortly thereafter. The nine men were finally pardoned in October, 1976. Only one of the men, Clarence Norris, who had spent 15 years in prison for the crime, was still alive at the time.
