Adapted from the transcript of the documentary Scottsboro: An American Tragedy. Go to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/scottsboro/filmmore/pt.html for the complete transcript.

This document is a script. The speaker's name appears first, then the words he/she says. The PBS Commentators (one is the son of the defense lawyer), are explaining what happened at the trial. Then we read the actual words of Victoria Price, Dr. Bridges, or lawyer Samuel Leibowitz. Then the PBS Commentators start talking again.

PBS Commentator: Victoria Price gets on the stand and in a matter of minutes says she was riding on a freight train. Suddenly a large group of Blacks comes hopping over on to the car that she is on, quickly dispatches with her White companions, beats them up, throws them off the train, and then en masse holds her up, rips her clothes off, and rapes her.

• Victoria Price: I hollered for help until they stopped me, until some of them knocked me in the head with the butt-end of a gun. They unfastened my overalls while I was standing up and then they threw me down on the gravel and finished pulling them off my feet. This Negro grabbed me by the legs and pulled them open and then one of them put a knife on my throat, and one got on top of me.
  

PBS Commentator: She just pointed at Haywood Patterson and said: "He raped me" right there in the courtroom.

Price's direct testimony lasted just 16 minutes, but made a powerful impression on the jury and the audience in the courtroom.

But Patterson's defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz was unconcerned. For months, he had waited for this moment: the chance to confront Victoria Price in a court of law.

He began his cross-examination by setting out an exact replica of the freight train which he had procured from the Lionel Toy Corporation.

PBS Commentator Robert Leibowitz, Samuel's son: My father had set up this Lionel train set in the courtroom in order to demonstrate where the alleged rape took place. Because his own clients had told him where and it did not coincide with where she claimed she was.

• Samuel Leibowitz: Just look at this little replica and tell me it fairly represents the general appearance of the box car you rode on?
  
  Price: It kinda represents one, but it ain't like the one I was on.
  
  Leibowitz: In what way is it different, can you say?
  
  Price: I won't say.
  
  Leibowitz: If you can't say, why do you say it is different?
  
  Price: Because that is not the train I was on. It was bigger, lots bigger -- that is a toy.
  

PBS Commentator: She just refuses for question after question after question to admit the most basic point that this in any way resembles the train that she was riding on. Leibowitz finds dozens, scores of inconsistencies. Yet Price has a manner that makes it difficult for him to make his points. It wasn't that he'd never had a difficult witness before. It was that he'd never had a witness that said over and over I 'can't remember.' Usually a witness is defensive when they say 'I can't remember.' She aggressively said she couldn't remember and used it to her advantage.

Another PBS Commentator: I feel if you are telling the truth you could look anybody in the eye. Victoria never looked directly. It was almost to the floor. Until she was made angry, and then she would shout, 'I don't know anything. I told you that before, and I'll tell it to you again.'

Leibowitz knew that he had to overcome one crucial piece of State's evidence: an examination of the girls just hours after they were brought from the train had turned up traces of semen in their bodies.

But Leibowitz believed he could explain the semen found in Price and Bates: not by rape on the day of the train ride, but by consensual sex the night before.

Price had claimed that she and Bates had spent that night in a boarding house in Chattanooga owned by a Mrs. Callie Brochie.

But Leibowitz had scoured Chattanooga and found no Callie Brochie anywhere.

So he asked her dozens of questions about Ms. Callie Brochie and where she lived and what she looked like and had she ever met her before.

• Leibowitz: You went to bed in the lady's house?
  
  Price: Yes sir.
  
  Leibowitz: Was it one floor or two floor?
  
  Price: I don't remember, four or five room house.
  
  Leibowitz: What sort of food, what did you do in the evening, what sort of bed or room?
  
  Price: I don't know.
  
  Leibowitz: By the way, Mrs. Price, as a matter of fact the name of Mrs. Callie you apply to this boarding house lady is the name of a boarding house lady used in the Saturday Evening Post stories: isn't that where you got the name?
  
  Price: I ain't never heard of that Callie!
  
  ...
  
  Leibowitz: Did you tell a man by the name of Lester Carter that you would introduce him to Ruby ?
  
  Price: I told you, I never seen Lester Carter before.
  
  Leibowitz: Isn't it a fact that the night before you left Chattanooga you and your boyfriend and Ruby and Lester Carter went walking along the railroad tracks?
  
  Price: No sir, we never have been on the railroad together.
  
  Leibowitz: Isn't it a fact, Mrs. Price, that you had intercourse with your boyfriend on the ground while Ruby had intercourse with Lester Carter right beside you?
  
  Price: We absolutely did not.
  
  Frustrated, Leibowitz finally shouted: "You're a pretty good little actress aren't you?"
  

Royer: And she fired right back at him immediately; she said you are a pretty good actor yourself. I remember that.

Unable to shake her story, Leibowitz resorted to accusing Price directly of lying.

• Leibowitz: Isn't the reason why you are making these charges you were found hoboing on a freight train?
  
  Price: I was seeking work for my mother.
  
  Leibowitz: And you saw the Negroes had been captured by the people at Paint Rock and you thought you would be arrested for vagrancy for being a hobo on a train in company with Negroes and at that time you determined to say they raped you to save yourself?!
  
  Price: No sir, I didn't!
  

From the testimony of Dr. Bridges

The state called to the stand Dr. R.R. Bridges, the Scottsboro physician who had examined Price and Bates hours after they'd been taken from the train. As expected, he confirmed that he had found semen in their bodies.

PBS Commentator: Leibowitz now cross-examines him and over the course of that cross-examination essentially turns him into a witness for the defense.

Leibowitz asked the doctor if the girls had shown any signs of a struggle -- bruises, or scratches? He answered: 'No'. Had the girls been hysterical, breathing heavily, with elevated pulses? 'No.' Had the sperm he had seen in his microscope been moving? Again: 'No.'

PBS Commentator: The spermatozoa were non-motile, that means they were dead. They would not have been non-motile if six Negroes had ejaculated into her an hour to an hour-and-a-half before she was examined by the doctor.