The later it got, the more arrests were made. It was Saturday night in “colored town.” People drank. Some got into fights. Occasionally there were knifings. But, as I watched, it was clear to me that most of the arrestees were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But the suspects were nevertheless hustled off to jail. For most of them, a $25 bond was not an option. They were quickly put into tiny cells, where most of them remained through their arraignments and until their trials – sometimes for many months.
Likewise, legal aid, as we now understand it, was virtually non-existent. The county’s lawyers were ordered by the local bar association and the judge to represent the accused on a rotating pro-bono basis. And since they weren’t about to give up their own Saturday nights, they rarely saw their “clients” until Monday morning.
By that time, many of the often-illiterate suspects had placed their “mark” on confessions, largely obtained through empty promises of freedom and/or brutal beatings. The sheriff and his deputies were particularly fond of arresting couples, and then sexually abusing a wife to extract a confession from her husband.
Customarily, the next time I saw these people was when they came before the county judge for trial. Their lawyers were often unaware of the charges, since they hadn’t bothered to read the court papers and police reports. Evidence of coerced confessions was routinely excluded, usually without the slightest hint of an objection from the defense lawyers. Juries were, predictably, all-white and all-male. Some of the attorneys appointed to defend the suspects showed up in court drunk, or with Saturday night hangovers. Others literally slept through the trials.
The next stop for most of those convicted of felonies was the state prison at Raiford, then widely acknowledged to be one of the more notoriously cruel, badly managed and overcrowded penal institutions in the country. There were few appeals; appeals cost money.
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