Over at JOTWELL, you'll find an admiring
review by
Gabriel "Jack" Chin (UC Davis) of "
The Jim Crow Jury," by
Thomas Ward Frampton (Harvard Law School). The article appears in Volume 71 of the
Vanderbilt Law Review (2018). Here's a taste of the review:
This article challenges the practice of non-unanimous criminal jury verdicts in Louisiana. In a certain sense, the article was irrelevant, moot, by the time it saw print. This is not because, say, it was about an election that was already over, or made an argument that the courts had definitively rejected. Instead, the claim in this paper was so factually, legally and historically compelling that even in draft form it spurred concrete action; thanks in part to this paper, the policy it analyzed was both declared unconstitutional by a court, and repealed by the voters.
The article carefully recounts the history of the substantial elimination of African Americans from juries in Louisiana after Reconstruction. African Americans were, of course, a major part of the population of most of the former Confederate states, and amounted to a majority in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. As Frederick Douglass wrote, “the liberties of the American people” depended on “the Jury-box” as well as “the Ballot-box,” if allowed to serve on juries, there was the danger that African American defendants would get a fair hearing, and that Whites (and White officials) accused of crimes against African Americans could be convicted. These were risks that White supremacists could not accept.
Read on
here.
