Samuel Leibowitz, the chief defense attorney, spoke with Haywood Patterson, one of the nine men charged with the rape of two white women on a train, in 1933 in Decatur, Ala.  ATLANTA â More than 80 years after they were falsely accused and wrongly convicted in the rapes of a pair of white women in north Alabama, three black men received posthumous pardons on Thursday, essentially absolving the last of the âScottsboro Boysâ of criminal misconduct and closing one of the most notorious chapters of the Southâs racial history.  The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously during a hearing in Montgomery to issue the pardons to Haywood Patterson, Charles Weems and Andy Wright, all of whom were repeatedly convicted of the rapes in the 1930s.  âThe Scottsboro Boys have finally received justice,â Gov. Robert J. Bentley said in a statement.  Thursdayâs vote brought to an end to a case that yielded two landmark Supreme Court opinions â one about the inclusion of blacks on juries and another about the need for adequate legal representation at trial â but continued to hang over Alabama as an enduring mark of its tainted past.  âItâs certainly something that when people hear it, they automatically associate it with the state in a negative manner,â said John Miller, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama who helped to prepare the pardon petition. âAlabama has worked as hard as anybody has to make sure that, to the extent that we can amend a legacy that is not flattering, we are trying to do the right things now.â  Others applauded the pardons but said they wanted to see the state consider the lessons of the flawed prosecutions in an era when Alabama has the nationâs third-highest incarceration rate.  âIâd like to see my state do more proactive things and get to a point where we donât have to be correcting mistakes,â said Fred Gray, a civil rights lawyer who represented Rosa Parks in the 1950s and submitted an affidavit endorsing the pardon petition. âWe should set up a procedure to prevent it from occurring in the first place, and we just havenât really done that.â  The men were among the group of nine teenagers who were first tried in April 1931 after a fight between blacks and whites aboard a train passing through Jackson County, in Alabamaâs northeastern corner, led to allegations of sexual assault. Within weeks of the reported rapes, an Alabama judge had sentenced eight of them to death following their convictions by all-white juries. The trial of the youngest defendant, Roy Wright, ended in a hung jury amid a dispute about whether he should be executed, and he was never retried.  The United States Supreme Court intervened the following year, setting off a long stretch of additional appeals and trials, including one in 1933 where Ruby Bates, one of the accusers, recanted her story.  Prosecutors dropped the rape charges against five of the men in July 1937, but four others â including those pardoned on Thursday â were convicted again and initially sentenced to death or decades in prison.  State officials ultimately agreed to release three of them on parole, including Clarence Norris, who was pardoned by Gov. George Wallace in 1976. Mr. Patterson escaped from prison and fled to Michigan.  The legal wrangling became a cultural mainstay, the subject of books, songs, television documentaries and even a Broadway production.  But Sheila Washingtonâs interest in the Scottsboro Boys was born of a less prominent moment: She came across a copy of Mr. Pattersonâs memoir in a bedroom when she was 17 years old and vowed to help the men get justice. She later founded the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center and, in 2009, began a campaign to seek pardons for the men, with the backing of researchers and lawyers throughout the state.  âI think we all realized that the convictions had been a terrible injustice,â said Judge Steven Haddock, who became a supporter.  But Ms. Washington quickly learned that while Alabama officials were willing to consider pardons, they lacked the legal mechanism to grant them posthumously.  Ms. Washingtonâs efforts led her to State Senator Arthur Orr, a white lawmaker from Decatur, a city about an hour from Scottsboro. He and other legislators agreed to sponsor a measure, unanimously approved this year, that created a process by which the Alabama authorities could issue pardons in select felony cases âto remedy social injustice associated with racial discrimination.â  On Thursday, Mr. Orr said that the legislation and the hearing it prompted had amounted to a moment of catharsis for Alabama.  âToday is a reminder that it is never too late to right a wrong. We cannot go back in time and change the course of history, but we can change how we respond to history,â Mr. Orr said. âThe passage of time and doing nothing is no excuse. This hearing marks a significant milestone for these young men, their families and for our great state by officially recognizing and correcting a tremendous wrong.â
The last of the nine black men falsely convicted of raping two white women in 1931 died years ago, but the case long hung over the state.