Elaine Race Riot - The Appeals

The Appeals

The NAACP also took on the task of organizing the defendants' appeal. The NAACP for a time attempted to conceal its role in the appeals, given the hostile reception its report on the violence and the trials had received. Once it undertook to organize the defense, it went to work vigorously, raising more than $50,000 and hiring Scipio Africanus Jones, a highly respected African-American attorney from Arkansas, and Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate veteran, former Attorney General for the State of Arkansas and unsuccessful candidate for Governor on the Progressive Party ticket.

The defendants' lawyers were able to obtain reversal of the verdicts by the Arkansas Supreme Court in six of the twelve cases in which death sentences had been handed down. The grounds were that the jury had failed to specify whether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree; those cases were accordingly sent back for retrial.

The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the death sentences of the six other defendants, rejecting the challenge to the all-white jury as untimely and finding that the mob atmosphere and use of coerced testimony did not deny the defendants the due process of law. Those defendants unsuccessfully petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari from the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision.

The defendants next petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus, alleging that the proceedings that took place in the Arkansas state court, while ostensibly complying with the requirements of a trial, were in fact only a form. They argued that the accused were convicted under the pressure of the mob, with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights. The defendants originally intended to file their petition in Federal court, but the only sitting judge was assigned to other judicial duties in Minnesota at the time and would not return to Arkansas until after the defendants' scheduled execution date. Judge John Ellis Martineau of the Pulaski County chancery court issued the writ. Although the writ was later overturned by the state Supreme Court, his action postponed the execution date long enough to permit the defendants to seek habeas corpus relief in Federal court, where U.S. District Judge Jacob Trieber issued another writ.

The State of Arkansas took a narrowly legalistic position, based on the United States Supreme Court's earlier decision in Frank v. Mangum. It did not dispute the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain confessions or mob intimidation, but the state simply argued that, even if true, this did not amount to a denial of due process. The United States district court agreed, denying the writ, but also found that there was probable cause for an appeal and allowed the defendants to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Moore v. Dempsey, the United States Supreme Court vacated six of the convictions 261 U.S. 86 (1923) on the grounds that the mob-dominated atmosphere of the trial and the use of testimony coerced by torture denied the defendants' due process required by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The other six men went back to trial and received sentences of 12 years.

Prominent Little Rock attorney George Rose wrote a letter to outgoing Governor Thomas McRae requesting that he find a way to release the remaining defendants if they agreed to plead guilty. Rose's letter was an attempt to prevent Governor-Elect Thomas Jefferson Terral, a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, from getting involved in the matter.

Just hours before Governor McRae left office, he contacted Scipio Jones to inform him that indefinite furloughs had been issued for the remaining defendants. Jones used the furloughs to obtain release of the prisoners under cover of darkness. The defendants were quickly escorted out of state to prevent their being lynched.

Within a month, Scipio Jones also obtained the release of the other defendants who had pled guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses.