Hale v. Commonwealth of Kentucky
| Decision Date | 11 April 1938 |
| Docket Number | No. 680,680 |
| Parties | HALE v. COMMONWEALTH OF KENTUCKY |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Messrs. Charles H. Houston and Leon A. Ransom, both of Washington, D.C., for petitioner.
Mr. A. E. Funk, of Frankfort, Ky., for the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Petitioner, a negro, was indicted in 1936 for murder in McCracken county, Ky. He moved to set aside the indictment upon the ground that the jury commissioners had excluded from the list from which the grand jury was drawn all persons of African descent because of their race and color and thus denied to him the equal protection of the laws in violation of the Constitution of the United States. In support of his motion, he presented an affidavit showing that the population of McCracken county was approximately 48,000, of which 8,000 were negroes; that the assessor's books for the county contained the names of approximately 6,000 white persons and 700 negroes who were qualified for jury service in accordance with the Kentucky Statutes, § 2241; that the jury commissioners filled the wheel for jury service for 1936 with between 500 and 600 names exclusively of white citizens and that no negro was excluded 'because he was not an intelligent, sober, discreet and impartial citizen, resident housekeeper' of the county or of the requisite age; that the failure to draw any negro for service was not due to any of the disqualifications mentioned in the Kentucky Statutes, § 2248. The affidavit further stated that petitioner could prove by sheriffs of McCracken county, serving respectively from 1906 to 1936, that during their terms no negroes had been summoned for service on any grand or petit jury in the county nor was the name of any negro placed in the hands of the sheriff to be so summoned; also that petitioner could prove by federal officials that for many years prior to 1936 negro citizens of the county had served on juries in the federal court at Paducah; also that petitioner could prove by many named citizens of standing in the community that for a long period of years there were negroes who were citizens of the county and qualified for service on juries in the state court. Petitioner alleged that the proof would show 'a long continued, unvarying and wholesale exclusion of negroes from jury service in this County on account of their race and color,' and that this practice had been 'systematic and arbitrary' on the part of the officers and commissioners selecting names for jury service for a period of 50 years or longer.
Petitioner filed a supplemental affidavit stating that he had learned that in one case in the state court in 1921 the trial judge had directed a negro jury to be summoned from bystanders, but that those negro jurors were not on the jury panel.
The attorney for the State stipulated that the original and supplemental affidavits should be considered as evidence and that the witnesses named would testify as therein set forth. No evidence to the contrary was introduced by the State. The motion...
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