The Martinsville Seven: Race, Rape, and Capital Punishment Book

This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of the case of the Martinsville Seven, a group of young black men executed in 1951 for the rape of a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia. Covering every aspect of the proceedings from the commission of the crime through two appeals, Eric W. Rise reexamines common assumptions about the administration of justice in the South. Although the defendants confessed to the crime, racial prejudice undeniably contributed to their eventual executions. Rise highlights the efforts of the attorneys who, rather than focusing on procedural errors, directly attacked the discriminatory application of the death penalty. The Martinsville Seven case was the first instance in which statistical evidence was used to prove systematic discrimination against blacks in capital cases.

Publishers Weekly

This is a careful exposition of a notorious Virginia case that led to the 1951 electrocution of seven young black men convicted of raping a white woman. Rise, who teaches sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, first sketches the Jan. 8, 1949, attack of Ruby Floyd in a black neighborhood in the western Virginia town of Martinsville. The black community, he notes, was shocked not by the convictions but by the death sentences. The NAACP and a discomfiting rival, the left-wing Civil Rights Congress, campaigned against the convictions. The author charges that the judicial system, which rejected several appeals, ignored the climate of ``hostility and prejudice'' against the defendants, valuing social order over due process. Most important, the appeals marked the NAACP's first attempt to use equal-protection arguments (previously cited in desegregation cases) to challenge racially disparate sentences. Such arguments persist today. Photos. (June)