Norris v. Alabama facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Norris v. Alabama |
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| Argued February 15, 18, 1935 Decided April 1, 1935 |
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| Full case name | Norris v. Alabama |
| Citations | 294 U.S. 587 (more)
55 S. Ct. 579; 79 L. Ed. 1074
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| Holding | |
| Exclusion of blacks from a grand jury by which an African-American is indicted, or from the petit jury by which he is tried for the offense, resulting from systematic and arbitrary exclusion of blacks from the jury lists solely because of their race or color, is a denial of the equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. | |
| Court membership | |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Hughes, joined by Van Devanter, Cardozo, Brandeis, Butler, Sutherland, Roberts, Stone |
| McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. | |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV | |
Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935), was one of the cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that arose out of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys. The Scottsboro trial jury had no African-American members. Several cases were brought to the Supreme Court to debate the constitutionality of all-white juries. Norris v. Alabama centered around Clarence Norris, one of the Scottsboro Boys, and his claim that the jury selection had systematically excluded black members due to racial prejudice.
Decision
On April 1, 1935, an 8–0 Supreme Court decision authored by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reversed the conviction of Clarence Norris on the grounds that evidence proved that African-Americans were unlawfully excluded from the jury. The lack of dissent characterizes the shift of national opinion on the ideas of race within the criminal justice system. The Court's opinion states that though Alabama had no direct laws prohibiting African-American involvement in juries, its practices essentially accomplished this discrimination.
The Supreme Court held that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was a significant advance in the Supreme Court's criminal procedure jurisprudence. Building on the existing precedent of Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), the Supreme Court addressed an Alabama statute that was facially neutral, but held that a criminal defendant could establish a prima facie (that is, accepted as true unless proven otherwise) claim of discrimination by showing that a substantial number of African Americans live in a community and that African Americans have been excluded from serving on juries. The prima facie evidence in this case was the disproportionality in the number of African-Americans who lived in the county compared to the number of African-Americans represented on juries.
Impact
The ultimate impact of the Norris v. Alabama case is its direct effect on how racial discrimination is viewed constitutionally. Prior to this judgment, all-white juries were commonplace and not considered unconstitutional. This Supreme Court opinion made racial diversity and proportionality an expectation in the courtroom. It relied upon the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the Equal Protection Clause, which states that the law should protect every American in an equal manner.
