Hardaway v. State

• Citation: 99 Miss. 223,54 So. 833
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Mississippi
• Decision Date: 17 April 1911
• Parties: BOB HARDAWAY v. STATE

54 So. 833

99 Miss. 223

BOB HARDAWAY v. STATE

Supreme Court of Mississippi

April 17, 1911

March 1911

APPEAL from the circuit court of Jones county, HON. PAUL B. JOHNSON Judge.

Bob Harding was convicted of unlawful retailing and appeals.

The facts are fully stated in the opinion of the court.

Reversed and remanded.

Bullard & Gavin, for appellant.

The district attorney realized that it was doubtful that the jury would believe an unsupported witness who confessed that he was actuated by motives of revenge or gain rather than the defendant, and to induce them to do so he proceeded to furnish them the reason, or rather motive, that would most likely accomplish this result. That was a direct appeal to race prejudice. "There are four reasons," he said "why I would believe the state's witness before I would the defendant. In the first place his skin is white while the defendant's is black; he is a white man and the defendant is a negro, and somehow or other it is just natural and inborn in me to believe a white man before I will a negro." The defendant objected and excepted, and the district attorney made it doubly worse by defying his counsel to object to that comparison as often as they pleased. "I have been where you are myself and I know how this kind of argument hurts." Thus he furnishes himself the reason for the condemnation of what he did. "Object to this comparison as often as you please." What comparison? That of the man with the white skin, and the man with the black skin; the white man and the negro. The truth of the man with the white skin, and perhaps the black heart and the truth of the man with the balck skin, and nothing so far as the record shows, to impeach his heart except his skin, which the district attorney was holding up to their gaze. "I have been where you are and I know how this kind of argument hurts." What argument? The comparison of the skins. And why does he know the argument hurts? Because he knows that the comparison goes home as he intended it should, and as it did. And that is the reason why he made the comparison, he knew that it would hurt. He knew that because of his gravely equivocal attitude, the state's witness needed a prop, or he must take the prop from under the defendant. There was no prop with which he could support his own tottering witness and he proceeded to take the last one from under the other. So he made the deadly comparison, the argument that hurts.

This manner of argument, this manner of appeal to race prejudice, when the invocation ought to be to do justice pure and undefiled, has never, so far as our records show, escaped without its fitting rebuke from this court. Whatever else we may deny the negro, we do give him the same measure of even handed justice we claim for ourselves.

In Hampton v. State, 40 So. 545 and Harris v State, 50 So. 626, this court sharply condemned such manner of argument and the case of Tannehill v. State, 48 So. 662, is an Alabama case very much like the case at bar. There, as here, the prosecuting attorney...