Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall was an American civil rights lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1967 until 1991. He was the Supreme Court's first African-American justice. Prior to his judicial service, he was an attorney who fought for civil rights, leading the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Marshall was a prominent figure in the movement to end racial segregation in American public schools. He won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, culminating in the Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which rejected the separate but equal doctrine and held segregation in public education to be unconstitutional. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall to the Supreme Court in 1967. A staunch liberal, he frequently dissented as the Court became increasingly conservative.
Chambers v. Florida, 309 U.S. 227 (1940), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that dealt with the extent to which police pressure resulting in a criminal defendant's confession violates the Due Process Clause.
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.
In the United States, capital punishment is a legal penalty in 27 states, throughout the country at the federal level, and in American Samoa. It is also a legal penalty for some military offenses. Capital punishment has been abolished in the other 23 states and in the federal capital, Washington, D.C. It is usually applied for only the most serious crimes, such as aggravated murder. Although it is a legal penalty in 27 states, 20 of them have authority to execute death sentences, with the other 7, as well as the federal government and military, subject to moratoriums.
Charles Hamilton Houston was an American lawyer. He was the dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel. A graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School, Houston played a significant role in dismantling Jim Crow laws, especially attacking segregation in schools and racial housing covenants. He earned the title "The Man Who Killed Jim Crow".
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. is an American civil rights organization and law firm based in New York City.
Robert Lee Carter was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
A false confession is an admission of guilt for a crime which the individual did not commit. Although such confessions seem counterintuitive, they can be made voluntarily, perhaps to protect a third party, or induced through coercive interrogation techniques. When some degree of coercion is involved, studies have found that subjects with highly sophisticated intelligence or manipulated by their so-called "friends" are more likely to make such confessions. Young people are particularly vulnerable to confessing, especially when stressed, tired, or traumatized, and have a significantly higher rate of false confessions than adults. Hundreds of innocent people have been convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death after confessing to crimes they did not commit—but years later, have been exonerated. It was not until several shocking false confession cases were publicized in the late 1980s, combined with the introduction of DNA evidence, that the extent of wrongful convictions began to emerge—and how often false confessions played a role in these.
The Trenton Six is the group name for six African-American defendants tried for murder of an elderly white shopkeeper in January 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey. The six young men were convicted in August 1948 by an all-white jury of the murder and sentenced to death.
Lisenba v. California, 314 U.S. 219 (1941), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the criminal conviction and death sentence imposed upon a man who confessed to murder after being detained for more than 24 hours, slapped and deprived of sleep and food. The petitioner argued that the confession was coerced, and that it violated his due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Willis Virgil McCall was sheriff of Lake County, Florida. He was elected for seven consecutive terms from 1944 to 1972. He gained national attention in the Groveland Case in 1949. In 1951, he shot two defendants in the case while he was transporting them to a new trial and killed one on the spot. Claiming self-defense, he was not indicted for this action. He also enforced anti-miscegenation laws and was a segregationist.
The Groveland Four were four African American teens, Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin. In July 1949, the four were accused of raping a white woman and severely beating her husband in Lake County, Florida. The oldest, Thomas, tried to elude capture and was killed that month. The others were put on trial. Shepard and Irvin received death sentences, and Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison. The events of the case led to serious questions about the arrests, allegedly coerced confessions and mistreatment, and the unusual sentencing following their convictions. Their incarceration was exacerbated by their systemic and unlawful treatment—including the death of Shepherd, and the near-fatal shooting of Irvin. Greenlee was paroled in 1962 and Irvin in 1968. All four were posthumously exonerated by the state of Florida in 2021.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
Separate But Equal is a 1991 American two-part television miniseries depicting the landmark Supreme Court desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, based on the phrase "Separate but equal". The film stars Sidney Poitier as lead NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, Richard Kiley as Chief Justice Earl Warren, Burt Lancaster as lawyer John W. Davis, Cleavon Little as lawyer and judge Robert L. Carter, and Lynne Thigpen as Ruth Alice Stovall.
Hale v. Kentucky, 303 U.S. 613 (1938), was a United States Supreme Court case relating to racial discrimination in the selection of juries for criminal trials. The case overturned the conviction of an African American man accused of murder because the lower court of Kentucky had systematically excluded African Americans from serving on the jury in the case. NAACP counsel, including Charles H. Houston, Leon A. Ransom and Thurgood Marshall, represented Hale.
William Robert Ming Jr. was an American lawyer, attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and law professor at University of Chicago Law School and Howard University School of Law. He presided over the Freeman Field mutiny courts-martial involving the Tuskegee Airmen. He is best remembered for being a member of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation team and for working on a number of the important cases leading to Brown, the decision in which the United States Supreme Court ruled de jure racial segregation a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Ashcraft v. Tennessee, 322 U.S. 143 (1944), is a United States Supreme Court case.
The trial of Joseph Spell was a 1940 legal case - State of Connecticut v. Joseph Spell - in which an African-American chauffeur was accused of raping Eleanor Strubing, a wealthy white woman who was his boss. The accusations and trial made sensational headlines. Spell was represented by Samuel Friedman and future US Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. The case is featured in the 2017 film Marshall.
Walter Ogrod is an American man who was convicted and sentenced to death for the July 12, 1988, sexual assault and murder of four-year-old Barbara Jean Horn in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to police, Ogrod confessed to Horn's murder four years after it occurred, but in 2020 the "confession" was recognized to be false. On June 5 of that year, Ogrod's conviction was vacated by the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and he was ordered to be released from prison. He had spent more than two decades on death row.
Crooker v. California, 357 U.S. 433 (1958), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that limited criminal suspects' constitutional right to counsel before trial, refusing to overturn a subsequent conviction without a showing that the refusal of counsel had a coercive or prejudicial effect. This holding was later overturned by Escobedo v. Illinois and Miranda v. Arizona.
