United States v. Cruikshank
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875)[1] was an important United States Supreme Court decision in United States constitutional law, one of the earliest to deal with the application of the Bill of Rights to state governments following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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Background
On Easter Day 1873, an armed white militia attacked Republican freedmen who had gathered at the Colfax, Louisiana courthouse to protect it from a Democratic takeover. Although some of the blacks were armed and initially defended themselves, estimates were that 100-280 were killed, most of them following surrender, and 50 were being held prisoner that night. A total of three whites were killed. This was in the tense aftermath of months of uncertainty following the disputed gubernatorial election of November 1872, when two parties declared victory at the state and local levels. The election was still unsettled in the spring, and both Republican and Fusionists had certified their own slates for the local offices of sheriff, parish justice of the peace, etc., in Grant Parish, where Colfax was the parish seat. Federal troops reinforced the election of the Republican governor.
Some members of the white mob were indicted and charged under the Enforcement Act of 1870. Among other provisions, the law made it a felony for two or more people conspired to deprive anyone of his constitutional rights.
Given the disproportionate rate of black fatalities, historians have come to call the event the Colfax Massacre. It was long called the Colfax Riot in local white communities, which suggests how they told the story: an event arising because blacks were out of control.[2]
Ruling
The Supreme Court ruled on a range of issues and found the indictment faulty. It overturned the convictions of two defendants in the case. The Court did not incorporate the Bill of Rights to the states and found that the First Amendment right to assembly "was not intended to limit the powers of the State governments in respect to their own citizens" and that the Second Amendment "has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government."
Although the Enforcement Act had been designed primarily to allow Federal enforcement and prosecution of actions of the Ku Klux Klan and other secret vigilante groups in preventing blacks from voting and murdering them[3], the Cruikshank court held that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses applied only to state action, and not to actions of individuals: "The fourteenth amendment prohibits a State from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; but this adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another."[4]
Dissent
Mr. Justice Clifford offered a concurring opinion that also voted to rescind the indictments, but for entirely different reasons: He found that section 5 of the 14th Amendment did, in fact, invest the federal government with the power to legislate the actions of individuals who restrict the constitutional rights of others, but also felt that the indictments were worded too vaguely to allow the defendants to prepare an effective defense.
Aftermath
In the short term, blacks in the South were left to the mercy of increasingly hostile state governments, who did little to protect them.[5] When Democrats regained power in the late 1870s, they passed legislation making voter registration and elections more complicated, effectively stripping many blacks from voter rolls. Paramilitary violence continued to suppress black voting. From 1890 to 1908, ten of the eleven former Confederate states passed disfranchising constitutions or amendments,[6] with provisions for poll taxes,[7] residency requirements, literacy tests,[7] and grandfather clauses that effectively disfranchised most black voters and many poor whites. The disfranchisement also meant that in most cases blacks could not serve on juries or hold any political office, which were restricted to voters.
The Cruikshank case effectively enabled political parties' use of paramilitary forces.
Continuing validity
Although significant portions of Cruikshank have been overturned by later decisions, it is still relied upon with some authority in other portions. Cruikshank and Presser v. Illinois, which reaffirmed it in 1886, are the only significant Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment until the murky United States v. Miller in 1939, but both preceded the court's general acceptance of the incorporation doctrine and have been questioned for that reason. However, the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, slip opinion 07-290, 51 fn 23, clearly suggested that Cruikshank and the chain of cases flowing from it would no longer be considered good law as a result of the radically changed view of the Fourteenth Amendment when that issue eventually comes before the courts:
With respect to Cruikshank's continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases. Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 265 (1886) and Miller v. Texas, 153 U. S. 535, 538 (1894), reaffirmed that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government. 
Regarding this assertion in Heller that Cruikshank said the first amendment did not apply against the states, Professor David Rabban has written that the Cruikshank Court "never specified whether the First Amendment contains 'fundamental rights' protected by the Fourteenth Amendment against state action....”[8]
The Civil Rights Cases and Rehnquist's opinion for the majority in United States v. Morrison referred to the Cruikshank state action doctrine.
References
- ↑ 92 U.S. 542 (Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com)
- ↑ Keith, Leanna (2008). The Colfax Massacre.
- ↑ Wormser, Richard (2004). The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.
- ↑ Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 at 554
- ↑ Finkelman, Paul (2006). Encyclopedia of American Civil Liberties.
- ↑ Chafetz, Joshua Aaron (2007). Democracy's Privileged Few.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Klarman, Michael J. (2004). From Jim Crow to Civil Rights.
- ↑ Rabban, David. Free speech in its forgotten years, page 148 (Cambridge University Press 1999).
