Unfair Integration

The modern South has learned its lesson: there is no legal justification for systematically excluding Negroes from juries. But what if Negroes are deliberately included?

In 1960 a Negro named Woodman J. Collins was convicted and sentenced to death for the "aggravated rape" of a white woman in Louisiana's Jefferson Davis Parish. On appeal, Collins' lawyer attacked the manner in which the parish impaneled the grand jury that indicted Collins. The parish is roughly one-third Negro, and, to make the grand jury "reasonably representative," the jury commission carefully placed six Negroes on a list of 20 veniremen. From those were drawn twelve grand jurors, including five Negroes. Despite this seeming fairness, argued his lawyer, the impaneling process denied Collins' right to equal protection of the laws under the 14th Amendment.

Nonsense, ruled the state Supreme Court and a U.S. District Court. But the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found a "fatal defect" in the organization of the grand jury because "the basis of selection was race." Well attuned to local mores, the appellate court stressed the "somewhat paradoxical" effect of such selection--the wide spread Southern phenomenon that fearful or complaisant Negro jurors have a tendency to be especially harsh on Negro defendants.

With Collins in prison awaiting action by another grand jury, the state has continued fighting to uphold his original conviction. Last week the state attorney general lost his last round when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the appellate court decision. In effect, the Supreme Court thus stood by Justice Stanley Reed's 1950 dictum: "An accused is entitled to have charges against him considered by a jury in the selection of which there has been neither inclusion nor exclusion because of race."

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