There once were two cats of Kilkenny. Each thought there was one cat too many. So they fought and they fit and they scratched and they bit till accepting their nails and the tips of their tails instead of two cats there weren't any.

I am Ryan McKnight. I'm Kara Santa Maria.

I am Christopher Smith.

Hi, I'm Andrew Torres.

This is Naked Mormonism.

The Serial Mormon History Podcast.

By late 1843, Joseph Smith had had over two dozen run-ins with the law that historians can document.

There's at least one known court appearance that happened in the 1820s before the Book of Vermont was published and he became a, you know, more than a profit and everything.

But that's a court appearance that historians don't know the details of as those details and

the documents behind it seem to have been lost to history.

It wasn't until the late Kirtland era that Joe ever had legal counsel for court appearances,

and that's because Joe was poor, and the idea of like a public defender or something

like that wouldn't be created for another half century after his lifetime.

It was another 40 years after that when the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution would be

interpreted to include competent legal counsel for any capital criminal case, and that was

in the case Powell v. Alabama, Supreme Court decision.

In Powell v. Alabama, that's a 1931 case, nine young men of color were

accused of raping two young white women. These young men came to be known as the Scotsboro Boys.

Now, these boys didn't have the resources to hire an attorney because, well, they were young

black men in the 1930s, and they weren't appointed any counsel by the judge.

So instead, the Scots Board of Boys were represented by a real estate agent and some old guy that hadn't practiced law in like 20 years.

All but one of these boys was sentenced to death.

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