Donald Trump’s lawyer John Lauro says it was both appropriate and necessary for the president’s team to cite the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys case when urging a federal judge to overturn Trump’s trial in Washington, D.C to postpone the January 6 charges.
Lauro, who appeared on Trump’s behalf in federal court on Monday, called the case a “fundamental element” of a defendant’s right to representation – and said Trump’s team was “ethically obligated” to raise it.
“We did not cite it on the grounds that there was any factual similarity.” [between the cases] – exactly what the state of the law was,” he told DailyMailcom, calling it something a lawyer “has a duty to do.”
Lauro and other lawyers on Trump’s team cited a Supreme Court ruling on the case in the first paragraph of their filing this month, arguing that it was nearly impossible to adequately process the millions of documents the government turned over in a timely manner attempt to process.
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, said lawyers have a “duty” to bring up the Powell v. Alabama case, which involved the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial. A federal judge said Trump’s own case was not progressing with the “haste of the mob.” She set the trial date for March 4th, one day before Super Tuesday
“We didn’t rely on the facts. We have only stated the current status of the law. And the state of the law says that everyone has the right to effective legal representation,” Lauro said. “In this case (the Scottsboro Boys) there was certainly no effective assistance of counsel. But we argued analogously that in the case of 12 million pages of documents, the lawyer needs time to prepare. But we had to cite this case.’
The settlement failed with the judge and sparked criticism from commentators in the high-profile case, already touted as one of the most significant criminal cases in U.S. history.
“We are obligated to cite the Supreme Court’s leading authority on the question of the right to counsel, and the leading case on the right to counsel is Powell v. Alabama, which is constitutionally compelling for a court to do so, and we were ethically obligated to to cite this case” as the Supreme Court’s leading case on the fundamental element of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Therefore, we had an ethical obligation to cite leading case law,” said Lauro.
“So to say that we did something stupid is just ridiculous,” he said, rejecting a judge who sharply criticized the decision in a television interview.
He was referring to a comment by retired California Supreme Court Justice LaDoris Cordell, who called the decision an “astonishingly stupid thing”. In an appearance on CNN after the judge’s decision, she called the move “absurd.”
Lauro rejected the idea that “this was somehow racially motivated or that this was in any way a dissident over the Scottsboro case, which is simply not true.”
A judge rejected an analogy put forward by Donald Trump lawyers by comparing his trial to the “hurry of the mob” in the infamous Scottsboro Boys case. Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Andy Wright, Willie Roberson, Ozie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charlie Weems, Roy Wright and Haywood Patterson were accused of raping two white women. The Supreme Court overturned their convictions in 1932 after hearings just days after arraignment
“This is something we had to do,” he said.
Chutkan, herself a former public defender appointed by President Barack Obama, called Trump’s situation in court Monday “fundamentally different” than the Scottsboro Boys case for “a number of reasons.”
The boys were “welcomed to Scottsboro by a large crowd and the attitude of the community was one of great hostility,” she noted.
“This trial does not advance the case with the haste of the mob,” Chutkan said, rejecting the analogy as she announced her decision after hearing from Trump’s lawyers and the administration.
Their trials “began six days after the indictment,” she said, noting that Trump was represented by “a team of zealous and experienced lawyers” and saying they had been given ample time to prepare.
The judge has the final say in court, although Lauro stood up at the end of Monday’s hearing and said he did not believe he could provide his client with adequate representation with a May 4 trial date – one day before Super Tuesday could.
Judge Tanya Chutkn chose a trial date two months later than prosecutors had requested. Team Trump proposed a trial in 2026
He told that Chutkan “did not agree” with Trump being denied the effective assistance of counsel, “but she in no way took offense at us citing an important case on the right to counsel.”
He further argues that the task of flooding an “avalanche” of material is a Herculean task, as the number of documents prosecutors have turned over in the investigation has now risen to over 12 million.
Attorneys referred to the Scottsboro Boys case in the same filing and sought to demonstrate the significance of the information contained in the case.
“Even if we could start reviewing the documents today, we would need to continue at a pace of 99,762 pages per day to complete the government’s first production by the proposed jury selection date (in January). “This is the entirety of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, cover to cover, 78 times a day, every day, from now until jury selection,” the filing says.
Prosecutors said the argument was unsound, pointing to extensive material on other complex cases.
In the Scottsboro case, which drew renewed attention in one of Trump’s many criminal trials, nine African-American boys were accused of raping two white teenagers on a freight train in Alabama.
They were brought to trial just six days after the arraignment and did not have time to select their own lawyers. They were charged just five days after their arrest. National Guardsmen had to remove them after a lynch mob formed. The first convictions came on the second day of the trial, and death sentences quickly followed – a brutal example of Jim Crow-era justice.
The Supreme Court overturned their convictions and ruled that they were denied the right to counsel, a violation of their due process rights.