The Scottsboro Trials And Racial Prejudice

When thinking of a jury, there is a belief that everyone is fair when it comes to making the decision of whether the person being accused of the crime is guilty or not guilty because of the person’s race. What if this belief is not necessarily correct? There have been many instances in whether race has been a factor when the jury makes a decision. According to Baskin, Goldstein, and Sommers (2014), there has been enough evidence to show that racial biases influences the decisions of a jury. In this paper, the articles will show how jury decision-making is influenced by the offender’s race.

The Scottsboro Trial was about nine young black men who were falsely accused of raping two

An instance of this can be the unfair treatment the Scottsboro boys received at multiple trials of theirs. The boys were evidently denied a fair trial. The jury was totally biased as most of them were white males. Which made it very difficult for the boys to even come close to winning the trial . It was even said that the rolls of the jurors were “tampered with and blacks had been unfairly excluded from serving on juries in the Alabama counties where the trials occurred”(Source 1). Which also made it impossible to clear the names of the boys who had clearly done nothing

serves as another major contributor to the racial lopsidedness which pervades the prison industrial complex. Alexander states that racial biases on juries has historic roots in slavery, “until 1860, no black person had ever sat on a jury in the United States. During the Reconstruction era, African Americans began to serve on juries in the South for the first time.” (Alexander, 117) Alexander contends that the lack of diversity on juries lead to countless miscarriages of justice against African-Americans. An example of this would be the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in which nine African-American teenagers were accused of rape by two white women. The teenagers were swiftly sentenced to death by an all-white jury even though one of the girls

The Scottsboro trial impacted America as a whole. The nine men being convicted of rape did not have a fair trial. During the 1930s, America was in a time of very serious segregation. If a black man supposedly slept with a “Southern white women” they would be lynched. A specific example of this would be when the Scottsboro boys were going to jail, a crowd of over 100 people tried to lynch them (Douglas O. Linder). In the time period, America had many race riots, so this incident would not be surprising. The Black men were trailed in separate cases (Linder). They were found guilty, an obvious verdict because of their ethnicity. The southerners believed that Blacks were criminals and should be sentenced to death if they were accused of committing

The Scottsboro trials were a case that occurred during the 1930’s dealing with rape of 2 white women by a group of young black boys. The trials included a huge amount of racism tying into the outcome. This accused offense of the boys occurred on a train. First these boy got in an alleged fight with some white men. The women got caught up in the fight. This resulted in the black boys and women to be thrown off the train in the town of Paint Rock Alabama (Johnson). When off the train the women yelled rape, causing the boys to be sent right to jail with the women (Johnson). The boys were then on trial for one day resulting in all the boys being found guilty (Anderson). Eight of the nine boys were sentenced to death and the

As the US Supreme Court ordered retrials of the boys because of a violation of the fourteenth amendment, granting the right to proper legal counsel. Then, between 1931 and 1937, there were a series of retrials and appeals. Differing from one another, three of the boys admitted to committing rape, while the other six denied it. The stupidity of the trials continued with lack of evidence and unfair juries. Medical reports show that there were no lacerations, tears of rough handling on the women, however yes they did recently have intercourse (Linder, Doug). Also Bates testified that Price had pressured her into blaming the boys so they would not get in trouble, but her words were not used as evidence (Scottsboro Boys Trials). The jurors were only whites, as racism was an issue during this time, making all of the hearings unjust. Eighty years after the court cases, the final of the boys got pardoned, with the boys serving time in jail, the judicial system is showing change. Even though the boys were punished for a crime they did not commit, “it resulted in two landmark supreme court decisions”, those being that defendants be tried by juries of their peers and the other requiring that destitute defendants receive proficient

The Scottsboro Trials had set a limit to falsely accusing someone and created a legacy of racism that had never been forgotten. “Also discovered aboard were two white female millworkers, Victoria Price, age nineteen, and Nancy Bates, age seventeen. Fearful that they, too, would be arrested,

Zane Umsted is a licensed attorney and law clerk in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa. He has witnessed the disparities of our judicial system first hand. His work will help us prove that race is an unfortunate label that depicts the sentence of an individual, bringing it to light from within the system itself. However the jurors do play a role in this.  Mike Morrison, Amanda DeVaul-Fetters, and Bertram Gawronski’s “ Stacking the Jury: Legal Professionals’ Peremptory Challenges Reflect Jurors’ Levels of Implicit Race Bias” will give us a better understanding of the sociological,psychological enigmas regarding the role of race of one’s implication in a crime that are found within the juros.

There was and there is a ton of racism going on in the world. Some of the psychological reasons people are racist is because of self esteem,dominance and other reasons (Routledge). The Scottsboro case happened in early 1930. Nine african american boys were on a train,a fight broke out. Two women named Ruby Bates and Victoria Price accused the nine boys of rape. Eight of the boys were sentenced to death, while the youngest got a year imprisonment. Ruby Bates later recanted her story (Anderson). The Scottsboro and Tom Robinson’s trial had several similarities. Both of the Defendants were black and the women who accused them of rape were white. There were no black people on the jury in both trials. All 3 of the women accused them of rape to cover up secrets( Johnson). The jury convicted Tom even though there was no evidence of him committing the crime (Lee

Jurors contribute much to racism dealing in rape and other cases. A study for The Journal of Social Psychology was conducted about Juror racism in Rape Trials by Patricia Herbert Landwehr et al., from the Department of Psychology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In Racism in Rape Trials, Landwehr et al. concluded, similar to a previous study done by R.W. Hymes et al., Acquaintance Rape, that juror racial bias is more likely to cause a defendant to be convicted if said defendant's race differed from that of their alleged victim. Many issues come alone with the racism and racial bias continuing in Jurors and Judges. Can they be settled? The Sentencing project developed Reducing Racial Disparity in the Criminal Justice System A Manual for Practitioners and Policymakers. In this manual members of the Project developed multiple ways to reduce Racial Disparity including ‘Encouraging Diversity in the Legal Profession’. Another way to reduce racial bias in the Criminal Justice System would be to hold Blind Trials. For a Blind Trial to be effective the Jury and Judge would only be told the crime the defendant has been accused of, the age, and gender of the defendant and prosecutor. They would also be told any priors the defendant may hold and any time they may have done. The Juror and Judge will also be able to hear the statements from both sides. They will not be

This was evident in the book To Kill a Mockingbird when Tom Robinson was accused of the rape of Mayella Ewell when he was in fact innocent. Just because he was a black man and Mayella was a white woman, Judge Taylor said, “Guilty… Guilty… Guilty… Guilty…” (Lee,

The Scottsboro Trials opened the eyes of blacks and whites to the racist legal system of the 1930’s. Nine African-Americans, known as the Scottsboro Boys, were accused of raping two white women. These young men were riding freight trains illegally to find better work. Officials with guns searched the train for any black youth, rounded them up, and took them to

The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers who were convicted in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931.The Scottsboro Trials demonstrated the racial discrimination in the southern criminal justice system. In a one-day trial, eight of the teenagers were sentenced to die in the electric chair. The youngest was sentenced to life in an Alabama prison. They were on trial for their life for a crime that didn’t happen. Charles Weems, Andy Wright, Haywood , Clarence Norris, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Roy Wright, Ozie Powell and Olen Montgomery were arrested and

In April of 1931, the nine men were put on trial in the span of four days. Unfortunately, the men received a drunk, inexperienced attorney who was uneducated about the laws of Alabama. In addition, the jury was made up of all white jurors, along with evidence that did not match the women’s accusations. This evidence included no signs of rape, like bruising,