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A Man Visited by History illuminates what author Steven P. Brown calls the "single Scottsboro case-related subject that has not been adequately explored to this point": the life of Judge James E. Horton, Jr., the white Alabama Eighth Circuit judge who set aside the jury's guilty verdict in the second trial of defendant Haywood Patterson in Decatur. Of the three trial judges and more than one hundred jurors who considered the cases of the Scottsboro defendants, Horton was the only one to find that the evidence against them was virtually nonexistent. Horton was then removed from further involvement with the cases and, despite being on the fast track to political prominence before the 1933 retrial of the Scottsboro defendants, was defeated for reelection for the Eighth Circuit in 1934 and spent the next four decades in relative obscurity.