Highly Placed Sources

The rape conviction of Tom Robinson, whose story was dramatized in Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird has been posthumously overturned after retired attorney Jean Louise Finch-Edmonds (better known as “Scout” from Lee’s novel) filed a petition with the Alabama Supreme Court. On the basis of a DNA analysis performed on the carefully preserved clothing Mayelle Ewell was wearing on the night she claimed Robinson attacked her, the courts threw out Robinson’s conviction and issued an apology to his surviving relatives. The 86-year-old Finch-Edmonds, who once again lives in her family’s Maycomb, Alabama home, said she was quite pleased with the verdict and that her father, Atticus Finch, who had defended Robinson at his trial in the face of blatant racism, “would have been relieved to be vindicated after all this time.”