A Hero Forgotten: Gus Garcia and the Litigation of Hernandez v. Texas (1954)

• Published in: Journal of Supreme Court history 2023, Vol.48 (1), p.31-53
• Main Author: Valle, Gabriel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Attorneys; Civil rights; Constitutional rights; Court hearings & proceedings; Disenfranchisement; Dissent; Equal rights; Good & evil; Grand juries; Hispanic Americans; Indictments; Juries; Jurors; Law; Litigation; Poll taxes; Precedents; Race; Racial discrimination; Rice; Segregation; Supreme courts; Taxation; Trials; Voting rights
• ISSN: 1059-4329; 1540-5818; 1540-5818
• DOI: 10.1353/sch.2023.a897346

The case went before Judge Ben H. Rice on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. [...]the justices unanimously held Mississippi's requirements to be a grand or petit juror, which included many hallmarks of race-based voter disenfranchisement such as literacy tests and poll taxes, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.24 The Court determined the laws "did not on their face discriminate between the races, and it has not been shown that their actual administration was evil, only that evil was possible under them. "25 Despite holding twelve years prior in Yick Wo v. Hopkins that the potential for racial discrimination under a law may be enough to invalidate the law, the Court in Williams distinguished away the case stating that Yick Wo involved the administration of laws "so exclusively against a particular class of persons," that no matter how "fair on its face" the law appeared, it's application rendered it unconstitutional.26 In Strauder v. Virginia (1879), the Supreme Court held it was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause to bar individuals from serving on grand or petit juries on account of the individual's race or previous condition of servitude.27 A half century later, in Norris v. Alabama (1935), the Court held that systemic exclusion of African Americans from jury service on account of being treated as a distinct class violated equal protection, a rule that came to be called the 'Rule of Exclusion'.28 Garcia hoped to expand and apply these precedents in the context of Latin American jury exclusion, relying on clear evidence of unequal treatment on the basis of national origin and the creation of a subjugated and distinct Latin American class. In it, he outlined five justifications: first, in the "selection of the Grand Jury Commissioners," who in turn chose the jury members, "defendant was … denied the equal protection of the law," under the Fourteenth Amendment; second, the defendant was deprived of his equal protection rights "in the selection of the Grand Jurors who returned this Indictment"; third, there were persons, especially of Mexican-American dissent, on the tax and poll rolls "who are qualified for Jury Commission and Grand Jury service"; fourth, approximately twenty-five percent of Jackson County's population was of Mexican Dissent and "considered as members of a separate race" by the people of Jackson County; and fifth, that the defendant had not had an opportunity to raise his constitutional rights "prior to