| Strauder v. West Virginia |
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Supreme Court of the United States |
Argued October 20–21, 1879
Decided March 1, 1879
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| Full case name: |
Strauder v. West Virginia |
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| 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 Haynes Swayne, Samuel Freeman Miller, Stephen Johnson Field, William Strong, Joseph Philo Bradley, Ward Hunt, John Marshall Harlan |
| Case opinions |
Majority by: Strong
Joined by: Waite, Swayne, Miller, Bradley, Hunt, Harlan
Dissent by: Field
Joined by: Clifford
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Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880), was a United States Supreme Court case about racial discrimination.
At the time, West Virginia excluded African-Americans from juries. Strauder was an African-American man who, at trial, had been convicted of murder—convicted, by an all-white jury. Strauder appealed his conviction, contending that West Virginia's exclusionary policy violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The majority, speaking through Justice William Strong, held that 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 the jury violated the rights of potential jury members; rather, such exclusion violated the rights of a black criminal defendant, since juries would be "drawn from a panel from which the State has expressly excluded every man of [a defendant's] race."
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 from juries, holding 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." 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)
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