Without Fear or Favor

Social order is based on law, and its perpetuity on its fair and impartial administration. Deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than to the one on whom it is imposed. The victim may die quickly and his suffering cease, but the teachings of Christianity and the uniform lesson of all history illustrate without exception that its perpetrators not only pay the penalty themselves, but their children through endless generations....

The Court will decide this motion upon the sole consideration of what is its duty under the law. The Court must be faithful in the exercise of the powers which it believes it possesses as it must be careful to abstain from the assumption of those not within its proper sphere. It has endeavored with diligence to enlighten itself with the wisdom declared in the cases adjudged by the most pure and enlightened judges who have ornamented the Courts of its own state, as well as the distinguished jurists of this country and its Mother England. It has been unstinted in the study of the facts presented in the case at bar....

The vital ground of this motion, as the Court sees it, is whether or not the verdict of the jury is contrary to the evidence. Is there sufficient credible upon which to base a verdict?

How can the physical condition of Price be reconciled with the gang rape she claimed to have suffered? Why did the jagged chert not bruise her back? Why did the pistol lick on her head not leave a visible wound? Why was no semen found in her pubic hair? Why was the spermatozoa in her vagina non-motile? Why was her respiration and pulse normal less than two hours after the rapes? Why was she not hysterical or crying?

When we consider, as the facts hereafter detailed will show, that this woman had slept side by side with a man the night before in Chattanooga, and had intercourse at Huntsville with Tiller on the night before she went to Chattanooga; when we further take into consideration that the semen being emitted, if her testimony were true, was covering the area surrounding her private parts, the conclusion becomes clearer and clearer that this woman was not forced into intercourse with all of these Negroes upon that train, but that her condition was clearly due to the intercourse that she had on the nights previous to this time.

How do we make sense of the glaring contradictions in the testimony of Ory Dobbins, the farmer who claimed to have witnessed the assault from his barn near Stevenson? Why did he testify that the woman he saw attacked was wearing a dress when Price was wearing overalls? Why did he say the attack occurred in a coal car when Price claims to have been raped in a gondola filled with chert?

This is the State's evidence. It corroborates Victoria Price slightly, if at all, and her evidence is so contradictory to the evidence of the doctors who examined her that it has been impossible for the Court to reconcile their evidence with hers.

Is it likely that Willie Roberson, the Scottsboro Boy shown to have been suffering at the time from painful swelling and genital sores caused by venereal disease and unable to walk without a cane, leaped into a gondola and joined a sexual assault? Is it probable that Olen Montgomery, blind in one eye and nearly so in the other, helped throw white boys off the train, then committed rape?

History, sacred and profane, and the common experience of mankind teach us that women of the character shown in this case are prone for selfish reasons to make false accusations both of rape and of insult upon the slightest provocation for ulterior purposes. These women are shown, by the great weight of the evidence, on this very day before leaving Chattanooga, to have falsely accused two Negroes of insulting them, and of almost precipitating a fight between one of the white boys they were in company with and these two Negroes. This tendency on the part of the women shows that they are predisposed to make false accusations upon any occasion whereby their selfish ends may be gained.

The Court will not pursue the evidence any further. As heretofore stated, the law declares that a defendant should not be convicted without corroboration where the testimony of the prosecutrix bears on its face indications of improbability or unreliability and particularly when it is contradicted by other evidence. The testimony of the prosecutrix in this case is not only uncorroborated, but it also bears on its face indications of improbability and is contradicted by other evidence, and in addition thereto the evidence greatly preponderates in favor of the defendant. It therefore becomes the duty of the Court under the law to grant the motion made in this case.

It is therefore ordered and adjudged by the Court that the motion be granted; that the verdict of the jury in this case and the judgment of the Court sentencing this defendant to death be set aside and that a new trial is hereby ordered.

Quoted in Douglas O. Linder ‘‘Without Fear or Favor:  Judge James EdwinHorton and the Trial of the "Scottsboro Boys"’’