RACES: No Jim Crow Juries

In Washington two years ago a Negro named Alfred Scott Aldridge shot and killed a white policeman named Harry J. MacDonald. To defend Aldridge the court appointed James Reilly, 28, who used to be a page in the U. S. Supreme Court. When Lawyer Reilly tried to ask prospective jurors if they were prejudiced against Defendant Aldridge because he was black, the trial judge summarily cut him short, declared his questions were no more proper than would be ones as to whether a talesman liked Irishmen or hated red heads. Negro Aldridge was convicted of murder. On May 8 he was to be electrocuted. Energetic Lawyer Reilly carried the case to the Supreme Court of the U. S. Last week that august tribunal did the very rare thing of voiding a capital conviction and saving a condemned man, at least temporarily, from death.

The Supreme Court’s opinion was written by Chief Justice Hughes. Said he:

“The argument is advanced on behalf of the Government that it would be detrimental to the administration of the law to allow questions to jurors as to racial or religious prejudices. We think it would be far more injurious to permit it to be thought that persons entertaining disqualifying prejudice were allowed to serve as jurors and inquiries designed to elicit the fact of this disqualification were barred. No surer way could be devised to bring the processes of justice into disrepute. . . . Despite the privileges accorded to the Negro, we do not think it can be said that the possibility of such prejudice is so remote as to justify the risk of forbidding the inquiry. And this risk becomes most grave when the issue is of life or death.”

Dissenting with his colleagues, Mr. Justice McReynolds (born in Kentucky, long practiced law in Tennessee) argued that race prejudice (“whatever that may be”) should have no standing in courts where Negroes enjoy equal privileges with whites. Said he: “The courts ought not increase the difficulties [of law enforcement] by magnifying theoretical possibilities. It is their province to deal with matters actual and material . . . not to hinder order by excessive theorizing of what in practice is not really important.”

Happy was Lawyer Reilly to win his first Supreme Court case on a far-reaching issue which would establish a precedent throughout the land in black & white murders. Happier still was Alfred Scott Aldridge who, if prosecuted again, will have the right to question every juror on race prejudice.