On Martin Luther King's birthday January 15, 1991 the country was transfixed by the expiry of the deadline for Saddam Hussein to withdraw from Kuwait. It little noted what was said in a Washington courtroom. A handful of reporters, of which I was one, and a group of high schoolers were the only listeners aside from the lawyers in the case and the Justices of the United States Supreme Court.
Thaddeus Edmonson lost his personal injury case for an accident which occurred on a Louisiana Army base but his lawyer appealed because as was common the defense lawyers struck peremptorily two Black jurors. Lake Charles, Louisiana trial lawyer James B. Doyle challenged the defendant's lawyers and lost. His client, an African American construction worker, had been denied a fair trial, Doyle argued. In civil cases such racially motivated strikes had never been thought to be unlawful. Seven years earlier the Supreme Court had barred such stereotyped actions in a criminal case - Batson v. Kentucky. Doyle, who usually defended oil and gas companies, thought that practice unjust and unlawful. He appealed and lost in the Fifth Circuit en banc. The Supreme Court took the case.
At argument Justice John Paul Stevens Stevens pointed to a statute, 28 USC 862 on the books, which provides that "[no] citizen shall be excluded from service as a grand or petit juror in the district courts of the United States ... on account of race, color, religion, sex, national origin or economic status."
The issue had been extensively briefed by Doyle. The statute had its origins in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the last of the major Reconstruction statutes, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public transportation and public accommodations and service on juries. The U.S. Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), saying it was an overreach - that the 14th Amendment promised protection only from state action.
The defense lawyers argued that the jury challenges - for which no cause was stated - were merely the acts of private actors - the defendant Leesville and its lawyers. But if it was the judge who excused the jurors who was the actor then it was game over, as Antonin Scalia recognized at the time, though he later dissented from the ruling.
But Doyle was ready. He had extensively researched the 1875 Act which prohibited disqualification of a petit juror "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Doyle had reserved two minutes of his time for rebuttal. In his peroration he switched the focus from Edmonson to the two excluded jurors. In an impassioned evocation of the rights of the challenged jurors -- Willie Combs and Wilton Simmons he said:
We don't know much about them ... but we can be sure that July 27, 1987 was a special day in their lives. For a black man or woman in Louisiana, the right to serve as a juror is as recent and as great an honor as the right to vote. They entered the federal courthouse in Lake Charles believing that times had changed, guided by the promise made in this city a quarter century ago -- that they be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. We urge this Court to keep that promise.
I ran from the courtroom and caught up with Doyle and NAACP amicus counsel on the steps of the court. Doyle tore the page with his closing from the yellow legal pad that was the everpresent tool of lawyers in those days before ubiquitous laptops and cell phones.
After a visit to pay my respects to fallen classmates at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial I wrote my story for the Law Journal on the Acela on my way back to New York. We didn't know that Anthony Kennedy would write the majority opinion, embrace Doyle's arguments, and pay tribute to Doyle in the Justice's address the following year. at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association. Doyle reminded him, Kennedy would say, to ask not only what the law is but what it should be.
Doyle's closing, I wrote, "was the only allusion to the fact that the case was argued on Jan. 15, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, which even The New York Times failed to note. The country was absorbed that day by the expiry of the deadline for war in the Persian Gulf. The high percentages of black people in the battlefield and in our prisons remind us that the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow has not yet been extirpated."
- GWC 1/15/2021
No comments:
Post a Comment