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Since he had helped convict Haywood Patterson in 1933 when he was State's Attorney General, Thomas Edmund Knight Jr. had risen to be Lieutenant Governor of Alabama. The defense soon pointed out that the State constitution forbade a man's holding two public jobs for pay. While Thomas Knight "laughed off" this objection, Judge William Callahan breezily overruled a plea that Knight be barred as special prosecutor at Trial No. 4 at Decatur.
In the ten months since he had last laid a fishy eye on Defendant Patterson and his Yankee counsel. Judge Callahan had not changed much. At the earlier trial he had had to be reminded at the last minute to instruct the jury what to do in case it happened to find Patterson innocent. In much the same spirit he now viewed the first Negroes who had shown up in the Morgan County courthouse since Reconstruction times in the role of possible trial Jurors. As Bibb Graves had promised. Alabama was "going to observe the supreme law of America."
A Negro had actually been a member of the grand jury which swiftly reindicted Patterson. However, it was one thing to allow a Negro to participate briefly in such a routine ceremony, and quite another to permit one to serve in the body that actually decided Patterson's fate. Every Negro in Alabama knew this. Therefore, the twelve black veniremen in Decatur last week were thoroughly uncomfortable. Judge Callahan was in no mood to put them at their ease. He had a few chairs placed outside the jury box for the Negroes to sit on. When one stage-struck blackamoor vacantly wandered into the jury box, his honor leaned over his bench, barked: "Here boy! Sit over there!" One of the Negroes lost no time explaining that his boss had recently shot himself while hunting, urgently needed him back home to run things. Two others guessed they were past the legal age limit of 65 for jurymen. One by one, the dusky dozen who would no more have dreamed of sitting on a jury with the "white captains" than they would of walking up and slapping the devil in the face, escaped from the courthouse by their own devices or were eliminated by the prosecution.
It took just seven hours for Prosecutor Knight to restate his case. It did not differ from the one his father, as a State Supreme Court Justice, had previously upheld in vain. Hard-faced Victoria Price who, it was charged, had slept with hoboes in a Chattanooga "jungle" the night before the alleged crime, told for the eighth time in public how Patterson and the other Negroes had chased off her white "boyfriends" and raped her in the freight car—a tale long since repudiated by Ruby Bates, the other alleged victim of the attack. When the State rested it was after 5 p. m. The courtroom was fetid. The defense had no witnesses on hand except Defendant Patterson, whom it did not want to call at that time. Nevertheless, Judge Callahan peremptorily ordered that the trial continue, that Patterson take the stand.
In the course of the trial he ruled out testimony relating to Victoria Price's poor past, objected to defense procedure which the State had let pass as satisfactory, was vague about noting defense exceptions and, when the defense tried to illustrate physical details about the freight train, complained: "It won't help anyone to see anything. It will just delay things."