The Scottsboro Case It is welcome news that the United
States Supreme Court has reversed the capital sentence passed by the court at Scottsboro, Alabama, on seven young negroes for assaulting two white girls. Liberal opinion in America, with uneasy recollections of the Sacco- Vanzetti case, has been striving for nearly two years to get a new trial for the boys, and it has succeeded. The sentence, to an English mind, seemed incredibly savage, and the evidence, to judge from the reports, was extremely unconvincing. The Supreme Court now affirms that the boys were denied counsel, so that their declarations of innocence were never properly presented. The ease will now go back to the Alabama courts for re-trial. The belief that a, negro may count on some sort of justice in the Southern States would be strengthened if the unhappy boys were released, for they have been lying under sentence of death since April, 1931. That is surely punishment enough.
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