Smallwood and an accomplice had robbed a woman a woman at gunpoint and raped her in a secluded place on September 26, 1993. Two days later, Smallwood and an accomplice robbed another woman at gunpoint and raped her in a secluded place. Smallwood inserted his penis with “slight penetration.” Smallwood and an accomplice robbed a third woman at gunpoint at a local school. Smallwood forced her to perform oral sex and raped her after.
He then asked the detectives “what are you questioning me for”, the police then told him that one women accused him of trying to rape her and another women accused him of actually raping her. The case stems from two assaults in lowell massachusetts. On November 16, 1983 a young woman was stopped by an unidentified man who engaged in conversation prior to sexually assaulting
The Scottsboro boys trial and the Tom Robinson trial in To Kill a Mockingbird are similar for these reasons. Mayella Ewell represents Victoria Price and Ruby Bates because Mayella made the crowd fell bad for her because she was a white, shy, and an unstable women. I think Lee kept these details the same because in the Scottsboro trial Price and Bates were the ones “raped”, and in the Robinson trial Mayella was the one “raped”. As I said Price and Bates are being represented by Mayella in the Robinson trial. Another similarity was that both trails were about rape.
The Scottsboro Trials were a set of trials where nine black boys named Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, Andrew Wright and Leroy Wright were accused of on March 25th, of raping two white women Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. These women were pressured to accuse the nine men. The white men that pressured the women told the conductor to stop at the next town so they could get the police. The police arrested the Scottsboro Boys and they were brought to trial. Eight out of nine of them were sentenced to death.
They were nervous because they thought they might get charged with the Mann Act, which is crossing borders with immoral intentions. To draw everyone's attention away from that fact, they claimed they were raped. Ruby Bates said that the whole story was made up and that Victoria Price told her everything to say. It is crazy to think that one of the supposed victims confessed that the whole thing was made up, yet the trials still continued on.
Likewise Trials Throughout the 1930’s, many accusations of rape were made against black males and brought up in court by white females. The Scottsboro Boys case (1931) and Tom Robinson’s case, from To Kill A Mockingbird, both represent how many of these cases played out. The Scottsboro Boys and Tom Robinson compare due to unfair trials and accusations held against them.
In the Scottsboro case, Victoria Price declared that nine African-American boys had raped her. Which, later on, in the many trials, people soon find out that she was lying. A definition of the word villain is, “in a film, novel, or play a character whose evil actions or motives are important to the plot”. In my opinion, Victoria Price’s actions make her a villain according to this definition. Firstly, Victoria is the reason for starting the madness and chaos from the case because she lied to everybody that she had been raped.
The Scottsboro trials was an incident involving nine black boys and two white women. One day in the 1930’s an unspeakable event happened. Several groups consisting of both black and white people were riding the rails. On one of the train cars, the black and white people began fighting (Johnson). When two white women got involved they were thrown off the train with the rest of the people in the fight.
The Scottsboro trials were trials in which two white women wrongly accused nine black men of rape (Anderson). Racism is very prevalent in the Scottsboro trials, as racism can be defined in this case as Whites pushing Blacks down to gain higher status (Schafer). It was found during the trial that many of the men were not in the same boxcar as the women and there was no doctor’s evidence of rape (Anderson). Anderson also states that the black men were given drunk, and clearly incompetent lawyers for this case. Even after one woman admitted that the rape never happened, the jury would not give in and the case continued (Anderson).
In the history of the United States of America, there have been many situations in which a trial was unfair, both in the cases of state and federal indictments. However, none of these have measured up to the outrageous inequity and negligence by the Alabama legal system in 1930. This poses the question: to what extent did the Scottsboro Trial reveal the faults of the U.S. Judicial System? Going so far to tie back to the Constitution, the Scottsboro Trial violated many rights of these boys, regardless of race; even the judges and prosecution put the system to shame. Aside from years of trial, falsely incriminating evidence, and biased courts, the Scottsboro boys faced years of judges, prosecutors, and mobs trespassing on their basic human rights.
The black youths managed to push all but one white youth off the train. The white men went to the next city and reported an “assault by a gang of blacks.” When the train stopped at Paint Rock the nine black youths were arrested in Alabama and sent to jail to await their trials (Linder). The creator of the website”The trials of the Scottsboro Boys” said that there were two girls on the train near the boys these two white girls named Victoria Prince and Ruby Bates falsely accused the nine boys of rape. The girls said the boys had pistols and knives and chased them through different carts of the train and raped them(Linder).
In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the story is set in the 1900’s, Maycomb, Alabama. During this time there was racism in the south and segregation which separated the whites and blacks from everything. There was also the Great Depression, the whole country was poor and people living in the country had to trade and do other jobs for people to either pay them off or to buy something from them. The trial in this book is about Mayella and Bob Ewell, two white people, claiming and arguing that Tom Robinson, a black person, raped Mayella Ewell. This trial is really important because at that time in the south, white people took advantage of black people and their kindness and thought they would take that or shut up just because they were black.
Injustice The Scottsboro Case shed light on the racial practices expressed in law that made a great impact on the legal system today. The actual victims of the Case did not receive a fair trial due to the color of their skin. The ones who played the victims planned the crime, and their stories made no sense. But like many of the trials during the time it wasn’t based on the actual evidence that was found,or even the defendants ' stories.
Racism played a part in the Scottsboro trials in many ways. Racism is an act of discrimination against ones race. Racism is motivated in many ways. People use it to boost their self-esteem to make them feel better about themselves. Structure is another part; whites want to have what they are familiar with and do not want change among society.
