State v. West

• Decision Date: 23 April 1906
• Docket Number: 16,067
• Citation: 40 So. 920,116 La. 626
• Court: Louisiana Supreme Court
• Parties: STATE v. WEST

40 So. 920

116 La. 626

STATE v. WEST

No. 16,067

Supreme Court of Louisiana

April 23, 1906

Rehearing Denied May 21, 1906.

Appeal from Fifteenth Judicial District Court, Parish of Calcasieu Edmund Dennis Miller, Judge.

Israel West was convicted of murder, and appeals. Affirmed.

Robert L. Belden and Thomas Kleinpeter, for appellant.

Walter Guion, Atty. Gen., and Leland Hugh Moss, Dist. Atty. (Lewis Guion, of counsel), for the State.

OPINION

BREAUX C.J.

Defendant was charged with having murdered E. M. Browning on the 29th day of December, 1905.

He was indicted, and on the 2d day of February, 1906, he was arraigned and pleaded not guilty. Before his arraignment, he filed a motion to quash the indictment, in which he averred that he is a negro, and that the man he was charged with having murdered was a white man; that there were no names of persons of his race in the jury box from which the grand jury was drawn that found a true bill against him, notwithstanding the fact that in the parish of Calcasieu there are over 2,000 persons of the African race who are competent to be jurors and who can read and write; that the forms of law were not followed; that the law of the state, as well as the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, were disregarded, and were not at all followed; that under the federal jurisprudence there should have been persons of his race on the jury.

A similar motion was made against the petit jury by whom he was tried, and in which he averred there were no negroes, owing to the unwillingness of the jury commissioners to place names of negroes in the jury box.

These motions to quash the grand jury, by whom he was indicted, and to set aside the petit jury, by whom he was found guilty, were heard and overruled by the trial judge.

The case was thereafter assigned for trial, and on the day assigned it was tried.

The jury found the accused guilty, without capital punishment.

From the verdict and sentence, defendant prosecutes this appeal.

The accused took a bill of exceptions to the court's action in overruling, as before mentioned, the motion to quash the indictment, and the motion declining to be tried by a jury composed exclusively of white persons.

In this bill of exceptions, the trial judge incorporated his statement in support of his ruling, which was that the motions were overruled because defendant completely failed to prove the allegations of his motions; that there was no proof that the deceased was a white man, and the accused a negro; that there was no evidence in the record showing that there were no negroes on the grand jury which indicted the accused; that defendant did not prove that there were no names of negroes on the general venire list in the general venire box; that counsel for the accused did not attempt to prove any discrimination by the jury commission in the selection and drawing of jurors on account of race or color; and that, in the absence of all proof to the contrary, it must be presumed that the jury commissioners did their duty.

In the brief filed in behalf of defendant, it is, in substance, stated that the motion to quash and the motion to suspend proceedings, or not to go to trial before a jury...