MONDAY & TUESDAY CLASSES
LEARNING TARGET: How did the murder of Emmett Till, and its aftermath, raise the question of how far Congress (and the President) could go in enforcing against states the Supreme Court's 14th Amendment equal protection and due process decisions?
* case study #1: From Emmitt Till to Rosa Parks to "the Little Rock Nine" to Rodney King: Congress and Civil Rights
* consider the following questions for discussion on the Emmett Till film:
b. What was the problem with federal intervention under the authority of the 14th Amendment and a federal law passed during Reconstruction which made it a crime for "two or more persons" to "conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person?"
United States v. Cruikshank: The main counts charging the defendants in general terms with violating the victims’ constitutional rights failed to specify precisely which rights had been affected. The gaps in the indictment required that those charges be dismissed. Similarly, the counts charging the defendants with interfering with the victims’ right to vote did not specify that the defendants had acted on account of race and therefore were fatally defective as a matter of drafting (due process issue). Further, the Court held that the Constitution secured only a limited range of rights and that it protected those rights only against abuse by the federal government. Although the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did protect against state abuses, the Colfax massacre was treated as a purely private conflict. Only governmental action could violate constitutional rights. In sum, Cruikshank suggests some of the potential obstacles to federal action against Emmett Till’s killers. First, his right to life, being a natural right, was not secured by the Constitution and therefore did not come within the scope of section 241. Second, even if one of his constitutional rights was denied, the perpetrators were private parties.
Screws v. United States: Three justices thought that the law was unconstitutional because the federal government had no authority to prosecute crimes such as homicide and assault that were the exclusive responsibility of the states.76 Four other justices voted to uphold section 242 but only insofar as it punished persons who acted with the purpose of depriving an individual of a specific constitutional right. Because the jury had not been instructed to this effect, Sheriff Screws was entitled to a new trial.78 Two other justices believed that the conviction should stand, but this would have left the Court deadlocked: four justices favoring a new trial, two justices favoring affirming the conviction, and three advocating dismissal of all charges on constitutional grounds, with no majority for any disposition of the case. To avoid this result, one of those two reluctantly joined with the four-member plurality in calling for a new trial at which the government would have to prove that Screws intended to deny Hall his day in court when the sheriff beat him to death in the course of arresting him on a minor charge.
Williams v. United States: This case construed section 241 in a restrictive fashion that would have precluded a federal prosecution of his killers. Williams involved some Miami private detectives who tortured several people who were suspected of stealing from their employer. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, overturned the convictions. The lead opinion by Justice Frankfurter, who had dissented in Screws because he thought section 242 was unconstitutional, reasoned that section 241 did not cover the conduct at issue. The rights protected by the conspiracy statute had to do with a person’s relationship to the federal government, such as the right to vote in national elections. Because the bar against subjecting people to the third degree applied only to state action, the federal government had no authority to prosecute private parties such as Williams and the other private detectives who engaged in brutal treatment of their fellow citizens.
c. If the federal courts could not intervene on behalf of Emmett Till, do you think that Congress, with new legislation, could create authority for the federal courts (and, for that matter, the President) to act in situations involving rights violations?