THE SUPREME COURT: Jury Trial

Slumped in a maximum security cell in Mississippi’s State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of a white woman in 1954, Robert Lee Goldsby, 32, a Negro, has one abiding concern: saving his skin. Last week the onetime lathe operator, whose death has been postponed five times in the past four years, won yet another legal delay, while simultaneously (and unwittingly) nudging forward the cause of Negro civil rights in the Deep South. Opening its fall term, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review —and thereby affirmed—last January’s far-reaching decision of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals: that Goldsby’s constitutional rights were denied by “systematic exclusion” of Negroes from the jury that tried him.

Under Mississippi law, grand and petit juries are drawn from lists of citizens who have registered and paid poll tax. Among the 8,836 Negroes of Carroll County, Miss. (pop. 15,448), where Goldsby was indicted and tried, there is not one registered voter—hence, no qualified Negro juror. Twenty-two other Mississippi counties with similarly heavy Negro populations are also without Negro voters. Taking note of these statistics, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard T. Rives, Alabama-born, ordered Goldsby retried within eight months (after the Supreme Court ruling) before “a legally constituted jury” (i.e., one chosen from a panel from which Negroes have not been excluded), threatened to grant Goldsby’s plea for a writ of habeas corpus if the state failed to comply. Plainly implied is a warning with impact beyond Mississippi’s borders: Negroes cannot lawfully be convicted of crime in counties that bar Negroes from jury service.