CRIMINAL JUSTICE

It is now a year and three months since the nine Scottshoro boys were put in the Death House in Birmingham to await electrocution after an obvious mistrial. In that time the case has been reviewed by the supreme Court of Alabama and finally by the United States Supreme Court. All the latter could do, although if found the trial unfair, was to order retrial in the same court and probably under mach the same conditions.

Whether or not these boys are guilty of raping two white girls found on the same train with them, a trial in which a Southern "house-swapping day, mob" plays the coercive part, should not decide their life or death. There seems to be something wrong with the system of laws which confines the decision of capital punishment to small districts, liable to unified prejudice or emotion. How many trials have been similar to this one at Scottshoro, it would be impossible to say. In this case it is almost matter of accident that the international Labor Defence got interested in it, otherwise the death sentence would have been carried out unquestioned.

Whether it be in Boston or in Alabama, there should be some provision for trying cases subject to emotionalism from an unbiased point of view. If the Fourteenth Amendment which gives right of fair trial to all individuals does not allow such a provision, some change should be made in the Constitution. To make justice possible in such cases, there ought to be a right of appeal for trial in Federal Courts.