Free Thurgood Marshall by Juan Williams Page A

two other men actually shot the store owner. But the jury was not persuaded. The three were convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to hang. A few months later one of the men, Donald Parker, had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Marshall’s client was not so lucky. On April 19, 1935, James Gross was hanged just after midnight at the Maryland Penitentiary. 6
    “The ringleader got off—he had a smarter lawyer than what the other boys had at the time,” said Patterson. “Parker’s lawyers were white. They had practices in Prince Georges County. And if you could afford to hire either of them or both, you could commit murder and get away with it.”
    Upon the death of his client, Marshall felt the sting of his own inadequacies as a lawyer. He was enraged by the arbitrary sentencing. The actual murderer was smiling and strolling out of court with a life sentence while the driver of the getaway car was sobbing and babbling for mercy as he walked to the gallows. Marshall had never opposed the death penalty, but now he saw it as a crude instrument, smashing the little guy while missing the bloody murderer.
    Another case that deeply affected Marshall came two years later. The Baltimore branch of the NAACP asked him to represent a black suspect, Virtis Lucas, who was accused in the fatal shooting of Hyman Brilliant, a white man. The Baltimore police picked Lucas up and questioned him for three days, severely beating him until he confessed. Marshall, using his brother to help with Lucas’s medical condition, went to the city jail and prepared him to stand trial. 7
    In a tense March trial that captivated the city, Marshall stood before an all-white jury and this time pointed the finger of blame at the police. It was an emotional trial for him. He didn’t want to lose another client to the death penalty, and he felt the weight of his family’s history, recalling the stories of his grandfather’s stand against police brutality in the “Cake Walk” homicide.
    Marshall began his defense by making sure the jury was aware of just how badly his client had been beaten after the arrest. Then he made his client into a sympathetic figure, a weak-minded boy who had been idlyshooting off a gun in an alley a few blocks away around the time of the murder. That youngster, Marshall contended, became an easy target for a murder charge when Baltimore police could not find the real killer.
    The all-white jury was swayed by the young lawyer’s pleadings. Lucas was found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to just six months in prison. 8 The Baltimore branch of the NAACP was thrilled that Lucas was not sentenced to be hanged. And they were greatly impressed that a black lawyer had been able to defend a black man in Baltimore’s white justice system.
    Marshall was learning how to work with the white legal system, creating a personal network among lawyers and judges in the city and building a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer. In the third major case of his young career, he broke ground as the first black lawyer to defend a white lawyer in Maryland. The white lawyer, Bernard Ades, had been defending a black client charged with murder. Ades challenged the conviction on the grounds that his client had not been given a fair trial because of his race.
    A radical lawyer best known for his ties to the Communist ILD [International Labor Defense], Ades was not popular with the state’s judges. Baltimore judges were openly hostile to unionization of the city’s blue-collar workforce. Picketing and strikes intended to shut down factories were often thwarted by court injunctions. Communists were frequently blamed by the city’s major employers for union-organizing attempts.
    After Ades charged that his client was a victim of the judge’s racism, Judge William C. Coleman wanted Ades’s right to practice law suspended and started a hearing in state court to take away his license. 9 Ades immediately