Norris v. Alabama
Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587, was one of the cases decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that arose out of the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, who were nine African-American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931. The Scottsboro trial jury had no African-American members. Several cases were brought to the Supreme Court to debate the constitutionality of all-white juries. Norris v. Alabama centered around Clarence Norris, one of the Scottsboro Boys, and his claim that the jury selection had systematically excluded black members due to racial prejudice.
Decision
On April 1, 1935, an 8–0 Supreme Court decision authored by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes reversed the conviction of Clarence Norris on the grounds that evidence proved that African-Americans were unlawfully excluded from the jury. The lack of dissent characterizes the shift of national opinion on the ideas of race within the criminal justice system. The Court's opinion states that though Alabama had no direct laws prohibiting African-American involvement in juries, its practices essentially accomplished this discrimination.The Supreme Court held that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from jury service violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case was a significant advance in the Supreme Court's criminal procedure jurisprudence. Building on the existing precedent of Strauder v. West Virginia and , the Supreme Court addressed an Alabama statute that was facially neutral, but held that a criminal defendant could establish a prima facie claim of discrimination by showing that a substantial number of African Americans live in a community and that African Americans have been excluded from serving on juries. The prima facie evidence in this case was the disproportionality in the number of African-Americans who lived in the county compared to the number of African-Americans represented on juries.