Editing Scipio Africanus Jones (section)

==The Elaine Twelve==
Jones is most famous for his skillful defense of the Elaine 12, twelve black [[sharecropper]]s sentenced to [[death penalty|death]] for allegedly being involved in the murder of a white man during the [[Elaine Massacre]] in October 1919. The twelve men had been convicted and sentenced to death by an [[all-white jury]] in a series of trials that were said to have lasted approximately 20 minutes.

The plight of the Elaine 12, and 87 other black men who were convicted to prison terms for participation in the riot, quickly made international headlines.  Three organizations offered assistance:  the Arkansas Conference on Negro Organizations (ACNO), the [[National Association for the Advancement of Colored People]] ([[NAACP]]), and the [[National Equal Rights League]] (NERL).  The ACNO and NERL joined to hire Jones as the defense attorney for all 99 of the convicted men.  The NAACP hired former state attorney general George W. Murphy as the defense attorney for the Elaine 12.  The two attorneys were friends and decided to work together.

When George Murphy died unexpectedly after they had started the retrial of six of the murder defendants in May 1920, after winning an appeal in the Arkansas Supreme Court, Jones took the lead in guiding the appeals process.  After much internal debate, the NAACP temporarily retained Jones as their replacement for Murphy, making him briefly the sole attorney for all of the 99 defendants. He successfully continued with the Moore et al. defendants, whose cases were reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Jones is credited with having been the author of the brief used before the Court.<ref>For the text of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus, see http://www.esauboeck.com/index/SA-Jones-petition-for-writ-of-habeas-corpus.html</ref>

When it was time to argue the Elaine 12 case before the Supreme Court, the NAACP decided to replace Jones with [[Moorfield Storey]] of [[Boston]], founding president of the NAACP since 1909, and former assistant U.S. attorney Ulysses S. Bratton of Little Rock. Jones continued to support the cases, and in 1923 the Supreme Court ruled in ''[[Moore v. Dempsey]]'' that, for the first time, collateral attack through [[habeas corpus]] was permissible on a state appellate court decision. It was a landmark precedent that marked the Court's review of state criminal cases from the point of view of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. During the trials, Jones received frequent lynching threats while in Arkansas. He was said to have shifted his location each night because of the risk to his safety.

New trials were granted to the twelve defendants as the court stated that they had not received due process in the original trials.<!-- Wrong; needs correction -->

Charges were quickly dismissed against six of the defendants.<!-- Wrong; needs correction -->  The remaining six were retried, convicted and sentenced to twelve years in prison. Jones successfully lobbied Arkansas Governor [[Thomas Chipman McRae|Thomas McRae]], who had earlier refused to release the defendants, to let men out on indefinite furloughs in 1925. Before leaving office, Governor McRae also pardoned the other 87 Elaine defendants.

This was hours before Governor-elect [[Tom Jefferson Terral]], a Klan member, assumed office. During a speech before one of the largest KKK rallies in Arkansas history the night before his inauguration, Terral vowed to execute the six remaining Elaine defendants as his first official duty in office.