Strauder v. West Virginia

Strauder v. West Virginia
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 20–21, 1879 Decided March 1, 1880
Full case name	Strauder v. West Virginia
Citations	100 U.S. 303 (more)
Holding
Exclusion of individuals from juries solely because of their race is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Court membership
Chief Justice Morrison Waite Associate Justices Nathan Clifford · Noah H. Swayne Samuel F. Miller · Stephen J. Field William Strong · Joseph P. Bradley Ward Hunt · John M. Harlan
Case opinions
Majority	Strong, joined by Waite, Swayne, Miller, Bradley, Hunt, Harlan
Dissent	Field, joined by Clifford

Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880), was a United States Supreme Court case about racial discrimination. Strauder was the first time that the Court had reversed a state criminal conviction for a violation of a constitutional provision concerning criminal procedure.

Background

At the time, West Virginia excluded African-Americans from juries. Taylor Strauder was a Black man who, at trial, had been convicted of murder by an all-white jury. Strauder appealed his conviction, contending that West Virginia exclusionary policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Opinion of the Court

The majority, speaking through Justice William Strong, held that categorical exclusion of blacks from juries for no other reason than their race did indeed violate the Equal Protection Clause, since the very purpose of the Clause was "to assure to the colored race the enjoyment of all the civil rights that under the law are enjoyed by white persons, and to give to that race the protection of the general government, in that enjoyment, whenever it should be denied by the States." The Court did not say that exclusion of blacks from juries violated the rights of potential jury members; rather, such exclusion violated the rights of black criminal defendants, since juries would be "drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly excluded every man of [a defendant's] race."

The Court did not hold that any particular jury must be racially balanced in order to satisfy equal protection; the categorical exclusion from all juries was the problem. This holding is reaffirmed in the important 20th-century equal protection case Washington v. Davis: "[Strauder] established that the exclusion" of African-Americans from juries violates equal protection, but if a particular jury or series of juries "does not statistically reflect the racial composition of the community does not in itself make out an invidious discrimination forbidden by the Clause 246 U.S. 229 (1976)

While a victory for the rights of black defendants and an important early civil rights case, Strauder v. West Virginia upheld the right of states to bar women or other classes from juries, holding, in the words of Justice Strong, that a state "may confine the selection to males, to freeholders, to citizens, to persons within certain ages, or to persons having educational qualifications. We do not believe the Fourteenth Amendment was ever intended to prohibit this. ... Its aim was against discrimination because of race or color." The precedent set by Strauder has continued to influence rulings in cases as late as 1961 in Hoyt v. Florida, 368 U.S. 57 (1961)

See also

• Batson v. Kentucky

Further reading

• De Cani, John S. (1974). "Statistical Evidence in Jury Discrimination Cases". Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (Northwestern University) 65 (2): 234–238. doi:10.2307/1142542. JSTOR 1142542. 
• Gillespie, J. R. (1950). "The Constitution and the All-White Jury". Kentucky Law Journal 39: 65. ISSN 0023026X. 
• Schmidt, Benno C., Jr. (1983). "Juries, Jurisdiction, and Race Discrimination: The Lost Promise of Strauder v. West Virginia". Texas Law Review 61 (8): 1401. ISSN 00404411. 

External links

• Full text of the decision & case resources from Justia & Northwestern-Oyez