United States v. Harris

This article is about the "Ku Klux Case". For the lobbying regulation case, see United States v. Harriss.

United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883),^[1] sometimes referred to as the Ku Klux Case, was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that it was unconstitutional for the federal government to penalize crimes such as assault and murder. It declared that the local governments have the power to penalize these crimes. The fact that many of these crimes were racially motivated in the south was ignored.

In the specific case, four men were removed from a Crockett County, Tennessee jail by a group led by Sheriff R. G. Harris and 19 others. The four men were beaten and one was killed. A deputy sheriff tried to prevent the act, but failed. Section 2 of the Force Act of 1871 was declared unconstitutional on the theory that an Act to enforce the Equal Protection Clause applied only to state action, not to state inaction.

External links

• ^ 106 U.S. 629 Full text of the opinion courtesy of Findlaw.com.
• Summary of case from OYEZ The summary from OYEZ is factually inaccurate in that it states the four prisoners were black. According to Crockett TN and Haywood TN censuses as well as other temporal records, they were in fact white.

References

Divine, Robert A., Breen, T.H., Geroge M. Fredrickson, Williams, Hal R., Gross, Ariela J., & Brands, H.W. (2005). The American Story. New York: Pearson Education, Inc. Page 413

Donate to Wikimedia