The Fashionable Legislation Library
How a Florida homicide and an unlikely justice created a ‘legal process revolution’
U.S. Supreme Courtroom Justice Hugo L. Black wrote the opinion in Chambers v. Florida three years after he joined the courtroom in 1937. His nomination turned controversial after his former membership within the Ku Klux Klan got here to mild. (Picture by the Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG by way of Getty Pictures)
In Chambers v. Florida and the Felony Justice Revolution, historian and former ABA Journal editor Richard Brust lifts the veil on a case that laid the groundwork for some rather more well-known civil rights victories.
On Might 13, 1933, shopkeeper Robert Darsey was robbed and murdered in Pompano, Florida. 4 Black migrant farm employees—Izell Chambers, Walter Woodard, Jack Williamson and Charlie Davis—had been seized and pressured by the native sheriff into confessing to the homicide underneath risk of lynching. Their appeals finally reached the U.S. Supreme Courtroom by way of the efforts of some devoted African American attorneys and succeeded in 1940.
In Justice Hugo L. Black’s written opinion for almost all, the justice drew parallels between the Jim Crow regime within the American South and the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in Europe. Chambers v. Florida forbade using psychological coercion—corresponding to threatening to show prisoners over to lynch mobs—in addition to bodily abuse as strategies for extracting confessions. The courtroom’s ruling declared that the protections of the Invoice of Rights prolonged into states’ legal instances and commenced to alter the sorts of instances that made it onto the Supreme Courtroom docket.
Brust sees it as a part of a trio of instances, which incorporates Moore v. Dempsey (1923) and Brown v. Mississippi (1936), that led to a “legal process revolution,” he tells the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles.
On this episode of The Fashionable Legislation Library podcast, Brust discusses the legal professionals who labored on the case, most prominently Simuel D. McGill, a Black lawyer in Jacksonville, Florida. He delves into the generational variations between the Floridian protection legal professionals and the attorneys of the NAACP’s Authorized Protection Fund who would go on to win key civil rights battles. He explains why Black would have been thought-about an unlikely creator for this opinion. And he shares what he might uncover in regards to the fates of Chambers, Woodard, Williamson and Davis after the trial.
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In This Podcast:
Richard Brust
Richard Brust was assistant managing editor on the ABA Journal from 1997 to 2015. He supervised the Nationwide Pulse and Supreme Courtroom sections and wrote options on subjects in authorized historical past. Brust is an award-winning author and editor and has a legislation diploma from Temple College. He lately was awarded a PhD in historical past from the College of Florida.
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