Constitutional Law

Refusing To Relinquish Poor Precedent

The U.S. Supreme Court has obstinately stood by one its worst rulings writes David H. Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC). More than a hundred years ago, the high court in United States v. Cruikshank overturned convictions of three men involved in a deadly mob attack on African Americans in Louisiana.

Gans, director of CAC's Human and Civil Rights Program, maintains that the case should have been clear cut:

The Fourteenth Amendment placed on state governments a duty to protect its citizens and other persons living in its jurisdiction from criminal acts and civil wrongs, and gave Congress the right to legislate to secure the right of protection when states refused to carry out their constitutional duty. This right of protection was one of the very reasons the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution – immediately after the Civil War, Southern states had left the newly freed slaves utterly unprotected from violent reprisals and other wrongs at the hands of white terrorist groups.  

Instead of overturning Cruikshank, the Court treats it, Gans writes, as a 'super-precedent immune from reconsideration because it was decided soon after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment.'

Full post as published by ACS Blog on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).