The retrial of Haywood Patterson got under way in early April, shortly after the choosing of the jury and the address of Judge Horton to the courtroom. This document is from a New York Times account of the testimony given on April 3. The star witnesses on this day were the chief accuser, Victoria Price, and Dr. R. R. Bridges, who had given her a physical examination within two hours of the alleged rape. Both witnesses had testified in the 1931 trial, but in April 1933 attention is called to Victoria Price's character and the contradictions in her testimony, giving rise to questions about her truthfulness. Furthermore, as this document illustrates, the testimony of Dr. Bridges for the first time is under serious scrutiny, not only from the defense attorney but from the presiding judge.

By RAYMOND F. DANIELL, Special to the New York Times. DECATUR, Ala., April 3.

Victoria Price, whose testimony two years ago at Scottsboro led Jackson County juries to condemn eight of nine negro defendants to death, repeated her charges today before Judge James E. Horton and a jury in the Morgan County Court House at the first of the retrials ordered by the United States Supreme Court.

At times when Samuel S. Leibowitz, chief of defense counsel, pressed searching questions regarding her past, her lip curled and she snapped her answers in the colloquialisms of the "poor white."

Mrs. Price entered an angry denial when Mr. Leibowitz asked if she had not concocted the whole story of the mass attack by the negroes and forced Ruby Bates, the other victim of the alleged crime, to corroborate her in order to forestall the danger of her own arrest for vagrancy or a more serious offense....

SHOUTS ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

"That's some of that Ruby Bates' dope," she shouted in a voice that shook with anger.

"You can't prove it," she shouted another time when Mr. Leibowitz promised to show the court that the condition in which doctors found her when she was examined at Scottsboro after an armed posse had taken the girls and the negroes off the train on which the attack supposedly took place, was the result of her misconduct the night before in a hobo jungle on the outskirts of Chattanooga.

Certified copies of court records from Huntsville where Mrs. Price lived with her widowed mother were offered by Mr. Leibowitz to show that prior to March 25, 1931, she had been arrested for offenses against the moral code.

She defended the testimony she had given with as much fire as she defended her reputation, heatedly denying at one moment that she had wrecked the home of a married woman with two babies, and in the next breath thrusting aside seeming inconsistencies in her testimony with apologies for her lack of education and faulty memory.

DOCTOR DESCRIBES INJURIES

Although Mrs. Price insisted that she had fought the negroes until her strength gave out, and declared that her head was cut open by a blow from the of a pistol wielded by Patterson, Dr. R. R. Bridges, the Scottsboro physician, who testified just before adjournment, said he had found only superficial bruises and scratches when he examined her.

While the doctor was on the stand judge Horton took a hand in the examination, showing particular interest in the physician's statement that neither Mrs. Price nor her companion, the Bates girl, were hysterical or nervous when they were brought to his office. Not until the next day, he said, did either of them show any signs of nervousness and then, after a night in jail, it manifested itself in tears.

The star witness for the State told the sordid details of the crime before a crowded court with unabashed frankness and plain-speaking. She repeated the lewd remarks she said the negroes made to her without the flutter of an eyelash and in a voice that carried to the furthest comer of the courtroom. The only women in the crowd which heard her story and the very clinical medical testimony which followed were two visitors from New York. At times they looked as though they wished they had not come.

New York Times, Tuesday, April 4, 1933, p. 10, Vol. LXMI.

Johnson, Claudia Durst. Understanding To Kill A Mockingbird. The Greenwood Publishing, Inc. Wesport, CT:©1994.

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