Skip to content
LPBN-Icon-v1
Human Rights at Home Blog
A Member of the Law Professor Blogs Network

Historic Perspective on Racial Discrimination in Police Interrogation and Prosecution

By humanrightsathome

Co-editor Brian Howe discusses the lengthy US history of racial discrimination in jury pool selection and the contemporary consequences of actual and threatened denial of a racially balanced jury to defendants of color.  Writes Brian:

The impact of race on the US criminal justice system has been one of the most significant human rights issues in our country’s history.  

Barely one hundred years ago, in 1906, a black man named Ed Johnson was charged with raping a white woman in Hamilton County, Tennessee.  According to his later habeas petition, the Tennessee prosecutor intentionally removed all blacks from the jury and grand jury, and local whites threatened his defense attorney with violence.  Johnson was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.  He filed a habeas corpus petition to the local federal district court, claiming that the State’s deliberate racial stacking of the jury deprived him of his due process rights to a fair trial.  The district court denied his petition, which Johnson ultimately appealed to the US Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court, rallied by Justice Harlan, agreed to hear the case and stay Johnson’s execution.  Later that same day, a white mob stormed into the jail where Johnson was held, dragged him to a nearby bridge, and lynched him.  A leader of the mob pinned a note to Johnson’s body reading: “To Justice Harlan.  Come and get your n____r now.”
 
Hamilton County sheriff Joseph Shipp was ultimately charged and convicted of contempt, for violating the stay of execution by allowing the lynching (to this day, the only criminal trial held before the Supreme Court in its original jurisdiction).  He served less than three months in prison for his role in Johnson’s death, and received a hero’s welcome on his return home to Tennessee. For more information on the trial, see:
 
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/trialaccount.html 
 
The US Supreme Court would eventually hear the issue Johnson raised.  In a series of cases culminating in Batson v. KY, the Court explicitly held that the Constitution does not allow the State to intentionally exclude minorities from a jury pool using preemptive strikes
 
Part II will discuss the 2014 Bond case addressing issues of racial jury exclusion nearly 100 years post-Johnson in the context of police interrogation.