In the Crown Heights riots (1991) in Brooklyn, New York, Lemrick Nelson was on trial for violation of federal civil rights laws (he allegedly killed a Jewish student). The district court judge, Judge Trager, using "nontraditional" methods, attempted to create diversity on the jury by using ethnic criteria (blacks and Jews) in an attempt to reflect the actual ethnic makeup of Brooklyn (Wilkenfeld, 2002). The Second Circuit Court, however, "struck down" judge Trager's construction of an ethnically reflective jury; the Second Circuit held that Trager's court "violated the Equal Protection Clause." The circuit explained that "...potential jurors' Fourteenth Amendment rights to be free from racially discriminatory state action preclude treating individual jurors differently based on a desire to maintain a certain aggregate jury composition" (Wilkenfeld, 2002), according to an account in the Columbia Law Review.
An article in the Journal of Supreme Court History (Bressman, 2007) reviews another case that relates to the Fourteenth, this one not dealing with race but rather gender, and it offers another perspective on the Equal Protection standard. Albeit this case does not fall under the category of affirmative action, it certainly relates to fairness in terms of minorities (women were previously classified along with African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans as "minorities"). The case was Goesaert v. Cleary; a woman was denied the right to obtain a bartending license in Michigan "unless she be 'the wife or daughter of the male owner' of a licensed liquor establishment" (Bressman, p. 88).
In this 1948 case, Goesaert sued as a challenge to the validity of the law "...on the ground that is impinged on the Equal Protection Clause...
Equal Protection Clause of 14th Amendment The equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment extended to protections of the Bill of Rights to all Americans, including pregnant women. Therefore, it is fundamentally unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to criminalize pregnant women who take illegal drugs for fetal abuse or neglect without applying the same conditions on pregnant women who endanger their unborn child by drinking alcohol,
The true spirit and meaning of the amendments, as we said in the Slaughter-House Cases (16 Wall. 36), cannot be understood without keeping in view the history of the times when they were adopted, and the general objects they plainly sought to accomplish. At the time when they were incorporated into the Constitution, it required little knowledge of human nature to anticipate that those who had long been regarded
Anti-Miscegenation Statutes in the U.S. Introduction Anti-miscegenation statutes in the U.S. had been in existence in many states since the early days of their founding. In California, for instance, the law forbidding the marriage of whites with non-white had existed since the middle of the 19th century—and it was not overturned until the state’s Supreme Court heard the case of Perez v. Sharp in 1948. Virginia had a similar anti-miscegenation statute, which
..In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife." (Smith, 2004; p.5) Smith relates that a
Amendments to the Constitution In any criminal cases, the individual will be arraigned before the judge. This is when they will be informed about the charges and given the chance to enter a plea. Once this takes place, is the point a preliminary hearing is scheduled. It focuses on the evidence and if there is enough to warrant a trail. If the judge is convinced there is enough evidence, they will
It is difficult to say whom the Supremacy Clause affects in particular, and why, because it has the potential to impact all Americans. For example, many of the ground-breaking Supreme Court decisions in recent time are based in some way on the Supremacy Clause. For example, the famous Civil Rights Supreme Court decisions such as Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) and Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S.
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