User:Ghostsena/Vasquez v. Hillery

Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U.S. 254 (1986) is a United States Supreme Court case. An African-American named Booker T. Hillery was convicted for murder by a California grand jury in 1962. However, the conviction of the defendant was indicted by a grand jury from which members of his own race were systematically excluded. This caused Booker T. Hillery to go after many petitions to have a retrial. He went into many courts for over 24 years to have his writ accepted. At last, Hillery was able to file for a Habeas Corpus. A habeas corpus is a court order to summon a prisoner to hear from a prison official the reason why he or her was imprisoned for the prisoner's "belief of unlawful detention" with evidence against it. The Supreme Court accepted the defendant's appeal due to suspicion of unlawful detention from Hillery's previous petitions in court. Afterwards they took into account the precedence because of the stare decisis doctrine, which judges are to not differ with previous decisions. However Hillery was acquitted of his crimes due to the Equal Protection Clause. The clause was made into effect in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment, which allowed equal protection under the law. The court held that a conviction is not valid if the jury was selected on "basis of race". The court also held that there should be no time limit on how long a habeas corpus relief to a prisoner should take depending on the state's ability to obtain a second conviction as complained by the prosecutors in the case, and finally that the decision made was not influenced by the and would change the law in a perceivable manner.

Historical Context
The original conviction of Booker T. Hillery was held during the early 1960's in California. At that current time, America was in the heart and midst of the Civil Rights Movement. However the movement was met up with discrimination, racism, and segregation. Many places including restaurants and bathrooms were segregated and even though schools were desegregated, only three percent of African-American attended schools with white children in 1964. Many African-Americans could not succeed because most white people would not allow a colored person to work for them in a high ranking workplace, if they did hire African-Americans it reflected negativity among other white workers. Police stereotyped black people to be the main suspect in any crime scene and if an African-American was to be sent to court, the jury and judge were to be all white to indict an innocent man if he were to be innocent. Some Americans disliked the movement and still continued unrighteous acts throughout all of the United States. Rifts between the White population and the Black population were growing enormously at the time, especially in California. The emergence of the Black Panther Party was a major contribution to the fire and only fueled more hatred with their violence among the community. The Black Panthers expanded to all parts of the United States and including other countries such as Algeria and Cuba. The Panthers would fight against aggression of Caucasians towards African-Americans and use violence with guns. They were connected to slayings of policemen and other innocents which gave them the way to being a hate group. California, being a mix of everything, became a war zone between African-Americans and White-Americans.

What's The Conflict
When Booker T. Hillery was first indicted by the Californian jury in 1962, he felt that he was wrongly convicted based on race. He claimed that the jury excluded blacks and was the cause for his conviction. It was unjust to purposefully exclude blacks from the jury and breaches Hillery's Fourteenth Amendment. To further extent it was proven with evidence that no black served as a juror and there were equally qualified black to serve if the court needed it. Unfortunately Hillery's case in California ended poorly partly in favor to the events in the United States and the state itself. With the birth of the Black Panthers in Oakland, Californiaand the Civil Rights Movement affecting all over America, it could have had potential to make some of the white population even more agitated could have caused this conviction based on race alone. When Hillery decided he wanted to petition for a habeas corpus, he tried for 16 years in California before trying to petition in the East coast and finally obtaining his grant.

Dissenting Opinion
Justice Powell delivered the dissenting opinion where Chief Justice Burger and Justice Rehnquist joined in.