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| Strauder v. West Virginia | |
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| Argued October 20–21, 1879 Decided March 1, 1880 | |
| Full case name | Strauder v. West Virginia |
| Citations | 100 U.S. 303 (more) 25 L. Ed. 664; 1879 U.S. LEXIS 1830 |
| Case history | |
| Prior | State v. Strauder, 8 W. Va. 686 (1874), verdict and sentence rev'd on state law grounds; State v. Strauder, 11 W. Va. 745 (1877), verdict and sentence aff'd on constitutional grounds |
| Holding | |
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| Court membership | |
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| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Strong, joined by Waite, Swayne, Miller, Bradley, Hunt, Harlan |
| Dissent | Field, joined by Clifford |
| Laws applied | |
| U.S. Const. amend. XIV, Civil Rights Act of 1866 | |
Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States about racial discrimination and United States constitutional criminal procedure.[1] Strauder was the first instance where the Supreme Court reversed a state court decision denying a defendant's motion to remove his criminal trial to federal court pursuant to Section 3 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.[2]
Its holding, along with those of its companion cases of Virginia v. Rives (1880) and Ex parte Virginia (1880) established the proposition that it is a denial to criminal defendants of the equal protection of the law for a state to exclude persons from service on a grand or petit jury on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. These holdings do not guarantee criminal defendants that the grand or petit juries involved in their case will be composed either in full or in part of members of a non-white defendant's race (as was sought in the Rives case), but held instead that equal protection demands only that potential jurors could not be excluded from jury service on account of their race. Additionally, the Supreme Court did not exercise its power of judicial review to strike down West Virginia's juror qualifications statute as unconstitutional, as Strauder and his attorneys did not seek such a remedy. Instead, Strauder desired his case be removed to federal court, where he expected he could receive a venire that included freedmen.
In Strauder and the companion cases, the Supreme Court also issued a narrow interpretation of the removal provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. 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. 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.
- ^ Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880).
- ^ Klarman, Michael J. (2000). "The Racial Origins of Modern Criminal Procedure". Michigan Law Review. 99 (1): 48–97. doi:10.2307/1290325. JSTOR 1290325.