Essay: BREACHING THE WHITE WALL OF SOUTHERN JUSTICE

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By the thousands, Negroes exercising their rights nonetheless seek to remove their cases from state to federal courts. Federal judges no longer send these cases back to state courts so readily as they used to; the 1964 Civil Rights Act permits remand orders to be appealed. Negroes still face a major hurdle: Southern federal district judges. Many are scrupulously fair, notably Alabama's Frank Johnson, an Eisenhower appointee, and Florida's Bryan Simpson, a Truman appointee. But others are deeply segregationist, a problem largely attributable to the Kennedy Administration, which surprisingly named such men as Mississippi's William H. Cox, who once described the Negroes involved in a case before him as nothing but a bunch of "chimpanzees" who "ought to be in the movies rather than being registered to vote."

The typical all-white jury breeds injustice in three ways: 1) Negroes committing crimes against Negroes are likely to be let off too easily; 2) Negroes committing crimes against whites receive unduly harsh penalties; 3) whites committing crimes against Negroes either get off scot free or receive token sentences. Into the last category falls the breakneck acquittal last September in Hayneville, Ala., of Thomas Coleman, accused of killing an Episcopal seminarian and wounding a Catholic priest, both civil rights workers. It was at least slightly embarrassing to the state that Coleman, one of the local white courthouse-hangers-on who are so often available for jury duty in the South, was on the venire list for his own trial. Another all-white Alabama jury did convict Hubert Strange last December for murdering a Negro motorist near Anniston; compared with the almost certain death that a Negro defendant would have drawn had the motorist been white, Strange got ten years, a sentence that makes him eligible for parole in three years.

However clear the failures of Southern justice, it is far from clear what should be done about them without weakening the nation's legal structure. Certainly no one wants to destroy the jury system in order to correct its abuses. After the Hayneville acquittal, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said: "This is the price you have to pay for the jury system, and I don't think it's too high a price. The situation has changed a great deal already."

To change it further, the President's forthcoming civil rights bill sets up detailed instructions for the selection of federal juries, composition of jury commissions, such technical matters as challenges by the defense. The jurors are to be drawn from voting rolls, but where there is evidence of racial discrimination, other methods are to be employed. Above all, the administration of the system is left to the Court of Appeals judges acting as the judicial council for each circuit, and not to individual, possibly segregationist judges. The bill also bars discrimination in state jury lists and puts federal courts in a watchdog position to ensure fairness, but it does not tell the states what procedures to follow.

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