RACES Conviction No. 3

Conviction No. 3

We find the defendant guilty as charged and fix his punishment at death.

Thus for the third time in three years did an Alabama jury last week decide the fate of 20-year-old Negro Heywood Patterson. Accused with eight other Negroes of raping two white girls in a freight car near Scottsboro, he had twice been saved from the electric chair by judicial appeal. The first conviction was set aside by the U. S. Supreme Court last year and a new trial ordered (TIME, Nov. 14, 1932). The second was voided by the judge at the second trial who claimed the verdict was unwarranted by the evidence. This time at Decatur Patterson was tried before another judge, white-haired, lantern-jawed William Washington Callahan. The all-white Alabama jury consisted of nine farmers, a painter, a store keeper, a truck driver.

Judge Callahan's announced intention was to "debunk" the Scottsboro case. At the first two trials there had been noise and bustle, the clicking of typewriters, he glare of camera flashlights. Last week Judge Callahan excluded all photographers. All was quiet as a squat, hard-faced blonde in a blue chiffon dress and a peaked black hat climbed to the witness stand, chewing snuff. Victoria Price, twice-married mill-hand, onetime vagrant, told in less than ten minutes and in language so foul that newshawks could not print it, the story of her alleged rape. Then she pointed to Heywood Patterson as one of her assailants.

Defense Counsel Samuel S. Leibowitz painstakingly cross-examined her while Judge Callahan bickered and interrupted. At a dozen points Victoria Price contradicted the story she had told at the two earlier trials. Lawyer Leibowitz read each contradiction into the record. When he sought to establish that she had spent the night with two hoboes in a Chattanooga "jungle" day before the alleged rape, Judge Callahan cut him short to protect "her chastity."

Ruby Bates, the other girl in the gondola car, was not there to corroborate Victoria Price's story. In a New York City hospital, she had already reversed her testimony months before, claiming the rape story was a frame-up. But Orville Gilley, hobo "poet" who had been in the gondola, did corroborate it. Defendant Patterson, nervous and blinking, took the stand to swear that he had never seen any girls on the train. "They told us in jail if we didn't say we done it, they'd kill us,'' he blurted. "They told us they'd give us to the mob outside."

Glaring frequently at Lawyer Leibowitz and intoning his words, Judge Callahan spent nearly two hours explaining to the jury how they could find Patterson guilty. When he had finished Lawyer Leibowitz and Attorney General Thomas Knight, the prosecutor, went up to the bench, whispered hastily in his ear. "Oh yes," said the judge, facing the jury. "I overlooked one thing. If you are not satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty as charged, then he ought to be acquitted." Twenty-six hours later came a resounding thump on the brown wooden jury room door. The bailiff let the jurors out. The foreman unfisted a moist crumpled note, handed it to the clerk. A thin smile faded from Patterson's lips as the clerk read his third death sentence.

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