Norris v. Alabama

Norris v. Alabama
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 15, 18, 1935 Decided April 1, 1935
Full case name	Norris v. Alabama
Citations	294 U.S. 587 (more) 55 S. Ct. 579; 79 L. Ed. 1074
Holding
Exclusion of blacks from a grand jury by which an African-American is indicted, or from the petit jury by which he is tried for the offense, resulting from systematic and arbitrary exclusion of blacks from the jury lists solely because of their race or color, is a denial of the equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Court membership
Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes Associate Justices Willis Van Devanter · James C. McReynolds Louis Brandeis · George Sutherland Pierce Butler · Harlan F. Stone Owen Roberts · Benjamin N. Cardozo
Case opinion
Majority	Hughes, joined by Van Devanter, Brandeis, Sutherland, Butler, Stone, Roberts, Cardozo
McReynolds took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935), 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.^[1] 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.^[2]