Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1880 — Important Supreme Court Decisions. [ARTICLE]

Important Supreme Court Decisions.

The celebrated political cases pending for some time in the Supreme Court of the United States have at last been decided In the case of the West Virginia negro who was convicted of murder, tbe laws of tbe State prohibiting the presence of colored men on juries, his trial"and conviction were pronounced illegal, as, und< r the circumstances, be was, by tlie exclusion of his own race from the jury, denied the equal protection of the Jaw guaranteed by the Fourteenth amendment. In the Virginia case, where a negro murderer had been tried by a jury composed entirely of white men, tlie State laws containing no prohibition on colored citizens from so serving, the action of Judge R ves. of tlie Federal bench, in removing the ease to his court for trial, was pronounced wrong. In the case of the State Judge, who presided in tho last-men-tioned trial, who was arraigned for persistently excluding colored men from juries, tho law not requiring it, it was held that tbe complaints against him weie well founded. In tho case of Davis, a Deputy Collector in a Tennessee district, who, while on a raid, killed a moonshiner, and was indicted for murder in a State court, it was decided that the killing was done by him as an officer of the united Stales in the discharge of his duly, and that, if the provocation had not been sufficient, ho would have been amenable to Federal, and not Slate, law.