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...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
