Civil rights lawyer Alton Maddox Jr., who represented victims of several notorious racist attacks in New York in the 1980s, has died. He was 77.
Maddox died Sunday in a Bronx nursing home, funeral director Isaiah Owens said.
Maddox represented Tawana Brawley, a Black teenager who claimed that a group of white men had abducted and raped her in 1987. A grand jury determined that Brawley’s story was a hoax, and former prosecutor Steven Pagones sued Maddox, fellow attorney C. Vernon Mason and the Rev. Al Sharpton for defamation for accusing him of taking part in the alleged attack.
A jury ruled in 1998 that the three men had defamed Pagones and ordered them to pay $345,000.
Maddox also represented Cedric Sandiford, one of three Black men who were accosted and chased by a group of white men in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach in 1986, as well as the family of Michael Griffith, who died after he was struck by a car during the Howard Beach attack.
