ABSTRACT
In Powell v. Alabama, 287 US 45, the US Supreme Court issued the first of two rulings in the notorious case of the "Scottsboro boys," nine African American males arrested in Alabama for the rape of two white girls, which was alleged to have taken place on a train. Ozzie Powell and eight other African American boys had been arrested, arraigned, and shortly thereafter tried for rape in an environment dominated by hostility and awash in racism. In issuing the Supreme Court's seven-two ruling, Justice George Sutherland recognized that the English common law had not extended the right to counsel in capital cases, but he argued that American states had almost uniformly rejected this exclusion. In Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 US 335, the Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment encompassed the Sixth Amendment right to counsel by requiring court appointment of counsel for indigents in noncapital felony cases .
