State court defiance and the limits of Supreme Court authority: Williams v. Georgia revisited.
Author | Dickson, Del |
CONTENTS
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INTRODUCTION 1424 II. THE CASE OF AUBRY WILLIAMS 1426 A. White Cards and Yellow Cards 1426 B. The Certiorari Petition: From Two-and-a-Half to Four Votes 1432 C. Oral Argument 1437 D. "A Smelly Situation": Harlan's Solution 1442 E. The Court in Conference: "Fixing It Up Burglary Proof" 1444 F. The U.S. Supreme Court's Formal Pronouncement 1449 1. The Majority Opinion 1449 2. The Two Dissenting Opinions 1452 G. The Message from Georgia: Go to Hell 1456 H. Back to the U.S. Supreme Court: The 1955 Term 1459 III. THE CONSEQUENCES OF Williams v. GEORGIA 1465 A. The Individual Justices' Votes 1465 B. The Southern Response to Williams 1468 C. The Court's Southern Strategy 1472 D. Williams and the Failure of the Court's Southern Strategy 1478 EPILOGUE 1480 Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum
--Do Justice Though The Heavens Fall. Inscription above the bench of the Georgia Supreme Court.
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INTRODUCTION
States have on many occasions refused to comply with United States Supreme Court decisions; rarely, however, have they overtly defied the Court.(1) It is even more unusual for such defiance to come from the state judiciary, the branch of government most closely tied to the federal courts. In Williams v. Georgia,(2) however, a state supreme court bluntly refused to recognize the U.S. Supreme Court's prior finding of jurisdiction, precipitating one of the most remarkable confrontations between state and federal judges in the annals of American justice.
Aubry Williams, a black man, was accused of having murdered a white liquor store clerk in downtown Atlanta in 1952. He was tried, convicted, and condemned by a jury that had been selected using procedures that all parties later agreed were racially discriminatory and unconstitutional. The Georgia Supreme Court, however, refused to grant a new trial, ruling that Williams had irrevocably waived his constitutional rights by failing to assert them in a timely fashion.
On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted jurisdiction and remanded the case, stating that Williams was entitled to a new trial and hinting that if the state court refused to order one, the U.S. Supreme Court would do so as a matter of federal constitutional law. On remand, a unanimous Georgia Supreme Court angrily reaffirmed its earlier decision. In an extraordinary opinion, it held that the U.S. Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to consider the case. The state court declared that it was not bound by any federal court judgment on the matter and implied that any further federal attempts to interfere in the case would be ignored. Despite this direct challenge to its authority, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant certiorari a second time and Aubry Williams was executed.
To the extent that this case is remembered at all, it is generally regarded as an unfortunate but historically insignificant footnote from the early years of the Civil Rights movement.(3) This Article challenges that perception. Far from inconsequential, Williams represented a critical moment in the Warren Court's struggle to undo the effects of Jim Crow in the South.
The first part of this Article presents a complete narrative of Williams v. Georgia, using unpublished primary sources (Georgia and U.S. Supreme Court archival materials, as well as numerous interviews with former U.S. Supreme Court clerks and other Court personnel, and interviews with sources close to the Georgia Supreme Court) to reconstruct and analyze the courts' attempts to resolve this case. The Warren Court knowingly allowed Georgia to execute an "innocent" man,(4) and the reasons why it did so reveal an interesting but troublesome side of Court decisionmaking. Considered solely on its own terms, Williams offers an excellent case study of the problems of Supreme Court policymaking at the limits of the Court's authority.
The second part of this Article examines the larger legal and political significance of the case. Williams' role in defining the Warren Court's troubled relationship with the South has never been well understood or appreciated. The case came to the Court at a crucial time--less than a year after Brown v. Board of Education and Bolling v. Sharpe and at virtually the same time as Brown II.(5) Faced with growing Southern intransigence over the Court's school desegregation rulings, the Warren Court sought to protect its own authority and the integrity of Brown by attempting to avoid potentially damaging confrontations with Southern governments over ancillary racial issues, even when serious individual injustices resulted. The Court followed this strategy in its refusal to review Williams' conviction a second time.
Instead of placating its Southern critics, however, Williams helped to spark a Southern backlash against the Warren Court and inspired increased opposition to the Court's desegregation policies. The Court's failure to respond to the Georgia court's assault on its authority was widely seen throughout the South not as a principled concession in the name of comity, but as an outright capitulation in the face of determined state resistance. Even as the Court announced its conciliatory "all deliberate speed" standard in Brown II, Williams was making it clear that this approach was not going to work.
Most legal scholars attribute the Court's problems in enforcing Brown either to the lack of effective support from the executive and legislative departments(6) or to the inherent limitations of judicial power.(7) If they hold the Warren Court accountable at all, they blame only the vagueness of its "all deliberate speed" pronouncement.(8) This Article suggests that the Court's public retreat and rout in Williams foreclosed any chance the Court might have had to secure Southern compliance with Brown.
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THE CASE OF AUBRY WILLIAMS
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White Cards and Yellow Cards
On October 4, 1952, a white sales clerk named Harry Furst was shot and killed during a daylight robbery at Simon's Liquor Store in downtown Atlanta.(9) Thirteen days later, a twenty-seven-year-old black man by the name of Aubry Lee Williams was arrested and charged with Furst's murder.(10) After being interrogated and placed in a line-up, Williams signed a written confession.(11) He was indicted four days later(12) and scheduled to be tried by a Fulton County jury on March 10, 1953.
At the time, jury panels in Fulton County were selected on a weekly basis by a superior court judge, who drew tickets from a wooden box containing the names of all qualified men in the jurisdiction.(13) The wooden container was called a traverse jury box, and those who were selected were called traverse jurors. The drawing was not a random process: white prospective jurors had their names written on white tickets, while everyone else had their names placed on yellow tickets. This allowed state officials to monitor--and presumably limit--the number of racial minorities allowed to serve as jurors in Fulton County. The yellow cards that were drawn were generally assigned to the criminal calendar, at least in part because the state could challenge black jurors more easily in criminal trials than in civil cases.(14)
On February 18, 1953, Superior Court Judge Jesse M. Wood drew the names of more than 120 traverse jurors to be summoned on March 9, the week that Williams' trial was to begin. After granting excuses for good cause, Judge Wood divided the remaining names into ten panels of twelve. He assigned the first five panels to hear civil cases and the remaining five to the criminal calendar.
Only four of the traverse jurors were black. All four were assigned to the criminal array and were among the panel of forty-eight men assigned to Aubry Williams the morning of March 10. The trial judge, E.E. Andrews, excluded three of them for cause, leaving the prosecutor to use his first peremptory challenge to remove the fourth.(15) Williams' court-appointed lawyer, Carter Goode, objected neither to the jury array nor to the selection procedures, even though the Georgia Supreme Court had criticized Fulton County's use of colored tickets to select jury panels a year earlier in Avery v. State,(16) and the U.S. Supreme Court had granted certiorari in that case only the day before.(17)
The prosecution introduced Williams' signed confession and called twenty-three witnesses to testify against him.(18) Williams' sole defense was a single, unsworn statement that he did not commit the crime and that he had been "afraid" when he signed the confession.(19) After deliberating for an hour and twenty minutes, the jury convicted Aubry Williams of murder, without a recommendation for mercy.(20) The entire trial, including jury selection, lasted less than a day. The following morning, Judge Andrews sentenced Williams to die in the electric chair.(21) Carter Goode filed a motion for a new trial on March 27, which he substantially amended on June 29.
In the meantime, on May 25, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Avery v. Georgia that Fulton County's colored jury tickets violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.(22) (Table 1 shows a partial comparative chronology of Avery and Williams and is useful to clarify some of the issues raised in the various motions for a new trial.) Despite the obvious parallels between Avery and Williams, Goode did not mention Avery in either the original or the amended motion for a new trial. Judge Andrews denied the motion for a new trial on the same day that the amended motion was filed,(23) and the judgment was affirmed by the Georgia Supreme Court on October 14.(24) Five weeks later, Aubry Williams was again sentenced to death.(25)
[TABULAR DATA 1 OMITTED]
It was not until December 1, more than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Avery v. Georgia and less than two weeks before Williams was scheduled to be executed, that Carter Goode filed a second, extraordinary motion for a new trial.(26) For the first time, Goode claimed that the use of white and yellow tickets violated...
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