Page 149 - Demo

237Probably the most famous attempted %u201clegal lynching%u201d is the case of the %u201cScottsboro Boys,%u201d nine young African-Americans charged with raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. During the trial, white mobs outside the courtroom demanded the teens%u2019 executions. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all-male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, the legal scholar Stephen Bright has written, %u201cthe [white] people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial.%u201d5 In reality, many defendants of the era learned that the prospect of being executed rather than lynched did little to introduce fairness into the outcome.Though northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, some in the South maintained the practice until 1938. The spectacles were more often intended to deter mob lynchings than crimes. Following Will Mack%u2019s execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon Newsreasoned:Public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution.Even in southern states that had outlawed public hangings much earlier, mobs often successfully demanded them.20In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed 5 Stephen B. Bright, %u201cDiscrimination, Death and Denial: The Tolerance of Racial Discrimination in Infliction of the Death Penalty,%u201d Santa Clara Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (1995).Heritage Images/Getty ImagesThis pamphlet, issued by International Labor Defense, a legal arm of the American Communist Party, shows men marching in support of the %u201cScottsboro Boys,%u201d nine young men between the ages of twelve and nineteen, accused in Alabama of raping a white woman. There were trials and retrials, and the case produced landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions; all the while the young men were incarcerated in the harsh conditions of the Alabama penal system.How does this image and the case of the %u201cScottsboro Boys%u201d illustrate a close connection between lynching and the conditions of the justice system? How does this image support the position that Bryan Stevenson takes on the idea of a %u201cpresumption of guilt%u201d?5 Bryan StevensonCopyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.