Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale. However, juries composed solely of one racial group are legal in the United States. We do not believe the Fourteenth Amendment was ever intended to prohibit this.... Its aim was against discrimination because of race or color." "The error of the circuit court in refusing the accused an examination before the county court of the county of Ohio upon said charge of murder, is fatal to all the other proceedings in the cause by which the accused was tried, convicted and sentenced to be hung..." Consequently, the supreme court reversed the circuit court's denial of the request for the preliminary examination, overruled and nulled all rulings made in the case after that point, set aside the verdict, and remanded the case with instructions that the preliminary examination take place in the county court in accordance with the law. If such a right exists and is denied by the state, may the case be removed to federal court pursuant to Congress's power of enforcement under the Fourteenth Amendment. On November 5, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death.
Judge Caldwell ultimately agreed that the 1872 indictment was still alive and before the federal court, and ordered Strauder discharged from state custody, finally freeing Strauder from his nine-years confinement. The amendment not only gave citizenship and the privileges of citizenship to persons of color, but denied to any State the power to withhold from them the equal protection of the laws, and invested Congress with power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce its provisions. A grand jury was convened and on October 20, 1874 it returned an indictment similar to that of May 20, 1872. The very idea of a jury is that it is a body of men composed of the peers or equals of the person whose rights it is selected or summoned to determine; that is, of persons having the same legal status in society as that which he holds. The case then proceeded to trial over May 6–8, 1873; the jury returned a verdict of guilty after approximately 90 minutes of deliberations. Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880), was a United States Supreme Court case about racial discrimination. Having announced its ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a mandate on July 9, 1880 remanding the case to the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, and ordered that the court reverse the decision of the circuit court and remand the case for further proceedings. The supreme court consequently affirmed the trial court's denial of the motion to remove of the case to federal court as correct. Strauder demurred the indictment as defective, arguing the facts alleged in the indictment did not rise to murder in the first degree, and that the panel from which the grand jury had been selected excluded non-whites. St. Paul Baptist Church (St. Albans, West Virginia) Second Ward Negro Elementary School; Seebert Lane Colored School; Simpson Memorial United Methodist Church (Charleston, West Virginia) Samuel Starks House; Ella P. Stewart; Storer College; Strauder v. West Virginia ARGUED Oct 20 - 21, 1879. At that point, Strauder pleaded not guilty to the indictment, and the trial proceeded to jury selection, which resulted in an all-white jury. 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 or other classes from juries by holding, in the words of Justice Strong, that a state "may confine the selection to males, to freeholders, to citizens, to persons within certain ages, or to persons having educational qualifications. [3]. The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution sets forth rights related to criminal prosecutions. We have again been called to consider them in Tennessee v. Davis, supra, p. 100 U. S. 257, and Strauder v. West Virginia, supra, p. 342 U. S. 303. As such, argued Strauder, the state circuit court had no jurisdiction, rendering its warrant invalid.
The Supreme Court provided that the remedy for denials of equal protection occurring during trial can be found in the appeals process; only those cases where equal rights cannot be enforced before state judicial bodies are appropriate to be removed to federal court. In American procedural law, a continuance is the postponement of a hearing, trial, or other scheduled court proceeding at the request of either or both parties in the dispute, or by the judge sua sponte. During the tenure of Morrison Waite as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Court heard an unprecedented volume and frequency of criminal cases. For a case to be removed to federal court, the denial of rights must occur in the constitution or laws of the state, or in other pre-trial actions of state officials, that state courts are without power to remedy—that is, it held that the Civil Rights Act required removal be based on objectively discernible facts about the denial of rights (such as the exclusion of freedmen from the jury pool by Judge Coles in Ex parte Virginia, despite Virginia law allowing freedmen to serve as jurors, an act in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1875), and not the defendant's subjective beliefs about potential outcomes of a state-administered trial. Strauder's step-daughter, Fannie Green, witnessed the murder, and Strauder threatened Green to remain quiet, lest she too be killed. A jury trial, or trial by jury, is a lawful proceeding in which a jury makes a decision or findings of fact. Today, however, the United States is one of only two jurisdictions, along with Liberia, that continues to use the grand jury to screen criminal indictments. It is specifically prohibited by law, which has been defined through a series of judicial decisions.
Instead, it proceeded with an analysis of whether the denial of equal protection of the law confronting Strauder was of a nature sufficient to motivate an exercise of Congressional authority under Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to enact federal legislation allowing for the removal of cases such as Strauder's to the local federal district court, presumably where the trial process, under the supervision of a federal judge, would enforce the defendant's rights against the state. Assisting Strauder's counsel in the arguments before the Supreme Court were U.S. Attorney General Charles Devens and former justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia Westel Willoughby.
Grand juries in the United States are groups of citizens empowered by United States federal or state law to conduct legal proceedings, chiefly investigating potential criminal conduct and determining whether criminal charges should be brought. [2].
Upon his return to Wheeling, Strauder was brought before the circuit court for Ohio County, West Virginia and given a preliminary examination, Judge Thayer Melvin presiding. ", United States constitutional criminal procedure, Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia, "Statistical Evidence in Jury Discrimination Cases", "Juries, Jurisdiction, and Race Discrimination: The Lost Promise of, 1.