Court Opinion

ID: 9420864
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:56:11.402548+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:27.367652
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
with whom Mr. Justice Douglas concurs,
dissenting.
The four petitioners in these cases are under sentences of death imposed by North Carolina state courts. All are Negroes. Brown and Speller were convicted of raping white women; the two Daniels, aged 17 when arrested, were convicted of murdering a white man. The State Supreme Court affirmed and we denied certiorari in all *549the cases. These are habeas corpus proceedings which challenge the validity of the convictions.
I agree with the Court that the District Court had ha-beas corpus jurisdiction in all the cases including power to release either or all of the prisoners if held as a result of violation of constitutional rights. This I understand to be a reaffirmance of the principle embodied in Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U. S. 86. I also agree that in the exercise of this jurisdiction the District Court had power to hear and consider all relevant facts bearing on the constitutional contentions asserted in these cases. I disagree with the Court’s conclusion that, petitioners failed to establish those contentions. The chief constitutional claims throughout have been and are: (a) extorted confessions were used to convict; (b) Negroes were deliberately excluded from service as jurors on account of their race. For the following reasons I would reverse each of the judgments denying habeas corpus.
First. In denying habeas corpus in all the cases, the District Court felt constrained to give and did give weight to our prior denials of certiorari. So did the Court of Appeals. I agree with the Court that this was error but disagree with its holding that the error was harmless. It is true that after considering our denials of certiorari as a reason for refusing habeas corpus, the district judge attempted to pass upon the constitutional questions just as if we had not declined to review the convictions. But the record shows the difficulty of his attempt to erase this fact from his mind and I am not willing to act on the assumption that he succeeded in doing so. Both the jury and confession questions raised in these death cases have entirely too much record support to refuse relief on such a questionable assumption. I would therefore reverse and remand all the cases for the district judge to consider and appraise the issues free from his erroneous *550belief that this Court decided them against petitioners by denying certiorari.
Second. Brown v. Allen, No. 32. Brown’s death sentence for rape rests on an indictment returned by a For-syth County grand jury. We recently reversed five North Carolina convictions on the ground that there had been a systematic racial exclusion of Negroes from Forsyth County’s juries for many years prior to 1947. Brunson v. North Carolina, 333 U. S. 851 (1948). Upon a review of the evidence in Brown’s habeas corpus proceeding this Court holds that Forsyth County’s discriminatory jury practice was abandoned in 1949 when the old jury boxes were refilled. The testimony on which the Court relies is that the names put in the 1949 box were taken indiscriminately from the list of county taxpayers, 16% of whom were Negroes, 84% whites. Other evidence relied on was that since 1949 four to seven Negroes have been included in each jury venire of 44 to 60. The concrete effect of the new box in this case was stated by the North Carolina Supreme Court to be this:
“One Negro woman served on the grand jury and at least one prospective Negro juror was tendered to the defendant for the petit jury and was excused or rejected by his counsel.” State v. Brown, 233 N. C. 202, 205, 63 S. E. 2d 99, 101.
The foregoing evidence does show a partial abandonment of the old discriminatory jury practices — since 1949 a small number of Negroes have regularly been summoned for jury duty. But proof of a lesser degree of discrimination now than before 1949 is insufficient to show that impartial selection of jurors which the Constitution requires. Negroes are about one-third of Forsyth County’s population. Consequently, the number of Negroes now called for jury duty is still glaringly disproportionate to their percentage of citizenship. It is not possible to at*551tribute either the pre-1949 or the post-1949 disproportions entirely to accident. And the state has not produced evidence to show that the partial continuation of the long-standing failure to use Negro jurors is due to some cause other than racial discrimination. Cf. Patton v. Mississippi, 332 U. S. 463, 466, 468-469. Recognizing this difficulty the Court sanctions the continued disproportions because they were the result of selecting jurors exclusively from the county tax list. But even this questionable method of selection falls short of showing a genuine abandonment of old discriminatory practices. Certainly discriminatory results remained. I do not believe the Court should permit this tax list technique to be treated as a complete neutralizer of racial discrimination.
Third. Speller v. Allen, No. 22. The jury that tried Speller was drawn from Vance County, North Carolina. Before this trial no Negro had served on a Vance County jury in recent years. No Negro had even been summoned. That this was the result of unconstitutional discrimination is made clear by the fact that Negroes constitute 45% of the county’s population and 38% of its taxpayers. The Court holds, however, that this discrimination was completely cured by refilling the jury box with the names of 145 Negroes and 1,981 whites. Such a small number of Negro jurors is difficult to explain except on the basis of racial discrimination. The Court attempts to explain it by relying upon another discrimination, one which can hardly be classified as most appealing in a democratic society. What the Court apparently finds is that Negroes were excluded from this new jury box not because they were Negroes but because they happened to own less property than white people. In other words, the Court finds as a fact that the discrimination, if any, was based not on race but on wealth — the jurors were selected from taxpayers with “the most property.” The Court *552then even declines to pass on the constitutionality of this property discrimination on the ground that petitioner’s objections were based on racial, not on property, discrimi-nations. I cannot agree to such a narrow restriction of petitioner’s objections to the jury that brought in the death verdict. Jury discriminations here seem plain to me and I would not by-pass them.
Fourth. Daniels v. Allen, No. 20. Here also evidence establishes an unlawful exclusion of Negroes from juries because of race. The State Supreme Court refused to review this evidence on state procedural grounds. Absence of state court review on this ground is now held to cut off review in federal habeas corpus proceedings. But in the two preceding cases where the State Supreme Court did review the evidence, this Court has also reviewed it. I find it difficult to agree with the soundness of a philosophy which prompts this Court to grant a second review where the state has granted one but to deny any review at all where the state has granted none.
The following facts indicate the obviousness of discriminatory Negro exclusion from jury service in Pitt County where this case was tried.
Negroes constituted about 47% of the population of the county and about one-third of the taxpayers. But the jury box of 10,000 names included at most 185 Negroes. And up to and including the Daniels’ trial no Negro had ever served on a grand jury in modern times. Petitioners made objection in ample time to juries so discriminatorily chosen.
The Court’s conclusion not to consider and act on this manifest racial discrimination rests on these facts: After petitioners’ death sentence they were granted an appeal in forma pauperis to the State Supreme Court. June 6th the trial judge granted 60 days for their lawyers to make up and serve their “statement of case on appeal.” Preparation of this statement (comparable to a bill of excep*553tions) consumed valuable time because of difficulty in getting the stenographic transcript. On completion petitioners’ counsel on Friday, August 5th, called the prosecuting attorney’s office to serve him but found he was out of town. According to the record he and his family were away for the weekend at a beach. They returned home Sunday, but he did not get back to his office until Monday, August 8th. Had the statement been delivered at his office by a sheriff on Friday the 60th day, apparently there would have been compliance with North Carolina law. Instead it was receipted for at his office on the 61st day, two days before his return from the beach. In the State Supreme Court the Attorney General moved to dismiss on the ground that the notice was one day late. Although admittedly the court had discretionary authority to hear the appeal, it dismissed the case. Petitioners were thereby prevented from arguing the point of racial discrimination and consequently it has never been passed on by an appellate court. This denial of state appellate review plus the obvious racial discrimination thus left uncorrected should be enough to make one of those “extraordinary situations” which the Court says authorizes federal courts to protect the constitutional rights of state prisoners. Cf. Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U. S. 519, 520-521.
The Court thinks that to review this question and grant petitioners the protections guaranteed by the Constitution would “subvert the entire system of state criminal justice and destroy state energy in the detection and punishment of crime.” I cannot agree. State systems are not so feeble. And the object of habeas corpus is to search records to prevent illegal imprisonments. To hold it unavailable under the circumstances here is to degrade it. I think Moore v. Dempsey, 261 U. S. 86, forbids this. In that case Negroes had been convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury selected under a practice of systematic exclusion of Negroes from juries. The State *554Supreme Court had refused to consider this discrimination on the ground that the objection to it had come too late. This Court had denied certiorari. Later a federal district court summarily dismissed a petition for habeas corpus alleging the foregoing and other very serious acts of trial unfairness, all of which had been urged upon this Court in the prior certiorari petition. This Court nevertheless held that the District Court had committed error in refusing to examine the facts alleged. I read Moore v. Dempsey, supra, as standing for the principle that it is never too late for courts in habeas corpus proceedings to look straight through procedural screens in order to prevent forfeiture of life or liberty in flagrant defiance of the Constitution. Cf. United States v. Kennedy, 157 F. 2d 811, 813. Perhaps there is no more exalted judicial function. I am willing to agree that it should not be exercised in cases like these except under special circumstances or in extraordinary situations. But I cannot join in any opinion that attempts to confine the Great Writ within rigid formalistic boundaries.