Five Stories of the Wrongfully Accused
Five Stories of the Wrongfully Accused
Franklin was not the first to express the principle that the wrongful imprisonment of the innocent is a worse crime than the failure to imprison the guilty. Nonetheless, it is one deeply ingrained in the collective understanding of right and wrong. However, there are times when crimes appear to be so appalling, our inherent biases are so strong, or a narrative takes the media by storm that the pursuit of the guilty and the pursuit of victim justice become imperatives that may violate Franklin's tenet. Here are five cases of people who were wrongly accused, what led to the accusations, and what they did to overcome them. Covering roughly a century of American history, each case is as unique as the individuals involved, and yet, taken together, they explore assumptions about race, gender, and power, and even how attempts to get beyond stereotypes and traditional assumptions can lead to a miscarriage of justice. https://www.effectivecpmnetwork.com/gr1hdw2ws?key=0b7c754200d6c5cdacfb68d29605121a
The Scottsboro Boys
In 1931, a group of
migrant workers—some Black, some white—got into a fight on a freight train
traveling through the Southern United States.
The Black workers forced the white workers off the train, but when the
train stopped in Alabama, police hauled the Black workers, who were between the
ages of 12 and 20, off the train and arrested them. Two white women who had been with the men who
had been forced off the train said that they had been raped by the Black
youths.
Three weeks after being arrested, the nine Black youths were tried in Scottsboro, Alabama, where they barely escaped being lynched. After three days of trials, doctors examined the women who made the claims and testified that they found no evidence of rape. However, an all-white jury found all nine youths guilty. They were all sentenced to death, except for the 12-year-old, Roy Wright. The case received national attention. There were claims that the verdicts represented a grave legal error due to the way the case was handled, particularly the fact that the accused did not have a lawyer until the day the trial started and that Black jurors had been deliberately excluded.
The case would be brought before the Supreme Court
multiple times over the following few years. In 1932, in the case of Powell
v., due to inadequate legal
representation, the Alabama high court overturned the convictions. The nine, on
the other hand, were tried again and found guilty by Alabama. The Scottsboro
Boys' two remaining appeals were decided by the Court in 1935 in Norris v.
Patterson and Alabama v. In both cases, Alabama's landmark decisions found that
the defendants' due process rights were violated by the exclusion of Black
jurors. In the end, five defendants had their convictions overturned, and the
remaining four were ultimately pardoned, but not before all nine had
collectively spent more than 100 years in prison.
The assassins of Malcolm X, 1965 photograph of Malcolm X in glasses and a suit looking to the side with a hand raised close to his face.
In 1966, three men were found guilty of killing Black Muslim leader Malcolm X. Two of them were cleared of all charges fifty-five years later. For as long as he could remember, the third man had maintained that the other two men had nothing to do with the murder. Malcolm X, the controversial and charismatic leader of the Black nationalist movement, was shot and killed on February 21, 1965, while he was giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Talmadge Hayer, who would later change his name to Mujahid Abdul Halim, was shot in the leg and arrested at the scene. Malcolm X had been a disciple of the Nation of Islam, led by Elijah Muhammad, before the two of them had a nasty and very public argument. Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, who would go on to be referred to as Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, respectively, were detained over the following few weeks and were charged with the assassination.
Additionally, both belonged to the Nation of
Islam. In 1966, the three men were tried. Halim admitted to being one of the
shooters at the scene, denied knowing Aziz and Islam, and declared them
innocent during his testimony. Aziz and Islam, along with Halim, were found
guilty and given life sentences despite the testimony and alibis that placed
them far from the scene of the murder. In 1977, Halim signed an affidavit
attesting to the innocence of the other two and naming four others as the
shooters, renewing his effort to clear them. Aziz received parole in June 1985,
more than 19 years after his conviction. Islam was also granted parole in 1987,
two years later. Halim was freed on parole in 2010, 45 years after the
assassination.
However, the case
wasn't officially reopened until a book came out in 2011 and a documentary was
shown in 2020. After a nearly two-year investigation by the Manhattan district
attorney's office and the Innocence Project, District Attorney Cyrus Vance
released a stunning report in November 2021 that found that law enforcement had
purposefully withheld evidence that probably would have led to Aziz and Islam's
acquittals. "These men did not get the justice that they deserved,"
Vance said in his conclusion. Islam's death in 2009 was too late to hear the
news. But Aziz was in court to hear his name being cleared. In his address to the court, he said that
while he was happy to be cleared, it only confirmed what he had known all
along:
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