Word: callahans
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...when he was State's Attorney General, Thomas Edmund Knight Jr. had risen to be Lieutenant Governor of Alabama. The defense soon pointed out that the State constitution forbade a man's holding two public jobs for pay. While Thomas Knight "laughed off" this objection, Judge William Callahan breezily overruled a plea that Knight be barred as special prosecutor at Trial No. 4 at Decatur...
...months since he had last laid a fishy eye on Defendant Patterson and his Yankee counsel. Judge Callahan had not changed much. At the earlier trial he had had to be reminded at the last minute to instruct the jury what to do in case it happened to find Patterson innocent. In much the same spirit he now viewed the first Negroes who had shown up in the Morgan County courthouse since Reconstruction times in the role of possible trial Jurors. As Bibb Graves had promised. Alabama was "going to observe the supreme law of America...
...allow a Negro to participate briefly in such a routine ceremony, and quite another to permit one to serve in the body that actually decided Patterson's fate. Every Negro in Alabama knew this. Therefore, the twelve black veniremen in Decatur last week were thoroughly uncomfortable. Judge Callahan was in no mood to put them at their ease. He had a few chairs placed outside the jury box for the Negroes to sit on. When one stage-struck blackamoor vacantly wandered into the jury box, his honor leaned over his bench, barked: "Here boy! Sit over there...
...long since repudiated by Ruby Bates, the other alleged victim of the attack. When the State rested it was after 5 p. m. The courtroom was fetid. The defense had no witnesses on hand except Defendant Patterson, whom it did not want to call at that time. Nevertheless, Judge Callahan peremptorily ordered that the trial continue, that Patterson take the stand...
...verdict something of a triumph. In fairly good spirits Counsel Leibowitz was proceeding with the case of another Scottsboro boy when the prosecution suddenly challenged written medical testimony made at the second trial by a physician now too ill to go to court and substantiate it orally. Thereupon Judge Callahan indefinitely postponed all further trials, ordered the prisoners back to jail in Birmingham...