June 28, 2007
Some Further Thoughts on Race, Money, and Justice Posted by Ellen Feldman at 03:00 PM EST I, too, admired John Steele Gordon’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, but I agree with Joshua Zeitz that money was not ultimately an issue in the defense of the Scottsboro boys, as they were called. Though the boys’ poverty did lead to shamefully inadequate representation in the first round of trials in 1931—one attorney was from Tennessee and claimed he knew little Alabama law; both lawyers were reported by contemporaries to be inebriated during the entirety of the speedy trials—once the case became an international cause, funds for the defense began to flow in not only from the North but from around the world. Samuel Leibowitz, the lead attorney in the 1933 trial, which followed the Supreme Court’s overturning of the convictions, was known as the next Clarence Darrow, and, thanks to the money he had made defending Al Capone (twice), Vincent (Mad Dog) Coll, and others of their ilk, he could afford to represent the boys without a fee and even pay his own expenses. Leibowitz was no more successful in the second trial in 1933 than his inebriated, incompetent colleagues had been in 1931, though he did make history when he appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court a second time. The court overturned the verdict on the grounds that Alabama barred blacks, or as the terms was then, Negroes, from sitting on juries. The ruling supposedly changed the way justice was meted out in the South, and, presumably, throughout the country. In a biographical sketch of Sam Leibowitz, Quentin Reynolds tells a story that is so good it’s hard not to suspect it’s apocryphal. Forced by his wife to take a holiday, Leibowitz found himself in Miami, but bored with sand and sea, he headed straight for the local courthouse. The case he stumbled upon was uninteresting, but the jury, made up of eleven white men and one black, captured his attention. When the court recessed for lunch, Leibowitz approached the defense counsel and, without introducing himself, expressed his surprise at finding a Negro on the jury. As Reynolds tells the story, the lawyer answered, “It’s all on account of a son-of-a-bitch named Leibowitz from New York. He came down to Alabama a few years ago to try a case and somehow he got to the Supreme Court in Washington, and damned if we haven’t had to put [them] on our juries ever since.” The Supreme Court’s second overturning of the Scottsboro convictions made history, but history has a way of refusing to stay made. In an article in The New York Times earlier this month, Adam Liptak wrote about Allen Snyder, a black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in Louisiana. “It took some work to get an all-white jury in a parish that is almost one-quarter black, but the prosecutors . . . used peremptory strikes—ones not requiring a reason—to remove all five eligible potential jurors who were black.” Some years ago Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote of “the racial discrimination that peremptories inject into the jury selection process.” Race still skews American justice, and the fact that it usually skews it against people of color does not make the injustice at Duke less shameful. But what of the less lurid and therefore not headline-making aspects of our legal system that perpetuate this racial rush to judgment?
|
