Twelve Black men were sentenced to the electric chair in Arkansas after a white mob had already killed hundreds of their neighbours. The lawyer who saved them had been born into slavery. Scipio Jones took the case for free, fought it for five years, and got every single one of the twelve out alive. After the Elaine massacre of 1919 — white posses killing Black sharecroppers across Phillips County, Arkansas — the state's response was to charge the survivors. Twelve men were condemned to death. Their trials lasted under an hour each. The juries were all white. In one case the jury deliberated for about eight minutes. Scipio Africanus Jones was born enslaved in Arkansas around 1863. He taught school, read law, and was admitted to the bar in 1889 in a state that had just spent two decades perfecting ways to keep men like him out of courtrooms. He took the Elaine cases, mostly without pay. He was not permitted to argue in some of the rooms he needed to be in, so he worked around it — building the record, finding the witnesses, raising money from Black churches and lodges across the state, and working with the NAACP. He split the twelve into two groups and fought them on two separate legal theories at once, because he had worked out that the same argument would not save all of them. Six he saved on a technicality about how the verdicts were recorded. The other six went to the Supreme Court of the United States. **Moore v. Dempsey**, 1923. The Court held that a trial conducted in a courtroom dominated by mob pressure is no trial at all, and that the federal courts can look behind a state's paperwork and say so. That ruling is one of the foundations of federal habeas corpus review in America. It is taught in every constitutional law course in the country. By 1925 all twelve were free. A man born the property of another man argued twelve of his neighbours off death row, and changed American law doing it. He died in 1943. His house in Little Rock still stands.