Civil rights attorney 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 at a Bronx nursing home, funeral director Isaiah Owens said.
Maddox represented Tawana Brawley, a black teenage girl who claimed a group of white men abducted and raped her in 1987. A grand jury ruled that Brawley’s story was a hoax, and former prosecutor Steven Pagones sued Maddox, fellow attorney C. Vernon Mason, and Rev. Al Sharpton for defamation for accusing him of participating in the alleged assault.
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 approached and pursued by a group of white men in the Queens neighborhood of Howard Beach in 1986, and the family of Michael Griffith, who died after being hit by a car during the attack on Howard Beach.
Maddox and other attorneys working with the Howard Beach victims have called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to the case. Charles J. Hynes was appointed special prosecutor and later served as Brooklyn District Attorney.
Nine people were eventually convicted on various counts in Griffith’s death.
Maddox also represented the family of Yusuf Hawkins, a black teenager who was shot dead in 1989 in the predominantly white neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Joseph Fama, who fired the shots that killed Hawkins, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to approximately 32 years to life in prison. He remains in custody, according to the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision website.
Raised in Georgia, Maddox attended Howard University and received a law degree from Boston College. He moved to New York City in the early 1980s.
Maddox’s survivors include a son, Charles. His wife Leola died in 2017.
