All-white Jury - History

History

Following the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery and guaranteed basic civil rights to African-Americans; the Civil Rights Act of 1875 extended this to "public accommodation" and jury selection, including the establishment of criminal penalties for court officers who interfered:

Sec 4. That no citizen possessing all other qualification which are or may be prescribed by law shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror in any court of the United States, or of any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude; and any officer or other person charged with any duty in the selection or summoning of jurors who shall exclude or fail to summon any citizen for the cause aforesaid shall, on conviction thereof, be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and be fined not more than five thousand dollars.

The United States Supreme Court subsequently ruled inconsistently in two 1880 cases before it. In Strauder v. West Virginia, the court held that an all-white jury violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment; yet in Virginia v. Rives, the court denied an appeal on similar grounds, noting that an all-white jury was not in itself proof that a defendant's rights had been violated. Effectively, this nullified Strauder, permitting a segregated legal system where whites could be tried by their peers but blacks could be denied the same privilege.

In 1883, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was overturned entirely by an 8-1 majority on the Supreme Court. In 1896, the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision enshrined the unofficial civil code termed Jim Crow, ranging from separate but equal accommodation to voter disenfranchisement and jury exclusion; blacks were thus denied access to the public, political, and judicial spheres.

The 1930s brought the Scottsboro Boys case, where nine black youths were accused of raping two white women, one of whom later recanted her testimony. Eight of the defendants were sentenced to death (although none would be executed). Defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz showed the Alabama Supreme Court that blacks had been kept off jury rolls, and that names of blacks had been added to the rolls after the trial to conceal this fact. The appeals in the case ultimately led to two landmark Supreme Court decisions. In Powell v. Alabama, the Court ruled that criminal defendants are entitled to effective counsel, and in Norris v. Alabama, that blacks may not be excluded systematically from jury service.

Despite Norris, the problem of exclusion of blacks from juries did not disappear. In 1985, the Supreme Court in Batson v. Kentucky addressed a situation where a prosecutor had used his peremptory challenges to strike all four blacks from a jury and obtained a conviction against the black defendant. Defendant was not able to demonstrate that the state's court system systematically excluded blacks from juries but nonetheless raised due process and equal protection arguments in his particular case. In Batson, the court ruled that the defendant could make a prima facie case for purposeful racial discrimination in jury selection by relying on the record and that a State denies a black defendant equal protection when it puts him on trial before a jury from which members of his race have been purposely excluded.