Alton Maddox, lawyer in Tawana Brawley hoax case, dead at 77

NEW YORK (AP) — Civil rights lawyer Alton Maddox Jr. has died. Funeral director Isaiah Owens says Maddox died Sunday at age 77 in a Bronx nursing home. Maddox was involved in several high-profile cases in New York in the 1980s. He represented Tawana Brawley, a Black teenager who claimed that a group of white men had abducted her and raped her in 1987. A grand jury determined that Brawley’s story was a hoax. 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.