![]() ![]() Elmer Rogers had been attacked (by ax and shotgun) and killed in their home. The case that brought Marshall to Hugo, Okla., in 1941, was one of the most extreme. Hank Walker/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Thurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court building in 1955. ![]() Marshall and his team of LDF lawyers had their desktops piled high with capital cases in which suspects’ confessions were believed to have been compelled by law enforcement officers through duress. The court’s 1940 opinion, however, had done little to stem the tide of police beatings during the interrogation of black suspects in the Jim Crow South. Florida before the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that coerced confessions by police are inadmissible at trial. He had, in fact, already argued and won Chambers v. The Lyons trial wasn’t Marshall’s first criminal case. Supreme Court, the special counsel for the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund would leave Oklahoma with an unbridled hope for the future. Lyons, would be a watershed moment in Marshall’s career as a lawyer, and despite the fact that he lost the case, which ultimately led to a rare and devastating defeat before the U.S. The murder trial of the sharecropper, W.D. He didn’t know it then, but when Thurgood Marshall boarded an Oklahoma-bound train at New York’s Pennsylvania Station in January of 1941 to defend a young, black sharecropper accused of murdering a white family and burning down their home, he was just days away from the case that would fortify his commitment to overhauling the criminal justice system as he knew it. We begin with a watershed moment in the life of our namesake. Sign up for our newsletters to receive all of our stories and analysis.įrom time to time, The Marshall Project will look back at the history of American justice and injustice. The Marshall Project is a nonprofit newsroom covering the U.S. Looking Back at the stories about, and excerpts from, the history of criminal justice. ![]()
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