The only criminal case ever tried in front of the US Supreme Court

Fascinating and horrifying at the same time. [Link]

The case was United States v. Shipp. There were nine defendants, all charged with contempt of court—contempt of the Supreme Court, that is. The U.S. attorney general had filed the charges against them directly with the court, thus giving it original jurisdiction in the matter. The petition alleged that the defendants and other people engaged in actions “with the intent to show their contempt and disregard for the orders of this honorable court ... and for the purpose of preventing Ed Johnson from exercising and enjoying a right secured to him by the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

It was a full-blown trial. There were special prosecutors, dozens of witnesses and a special mas­ter assigned to take the evidence. The trial rec­ord exceeded 2,200 pages. Each side was given a full day of oral argument before the justices.

Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, who normally encouraged his colleagues to write the court’s opin­ions, decided that the importance of this case demanded that he take on the responsibility. Before reading the opinion that accompanied their verdict, Fuller—in his typically soft, almost inaudible voice —noted to a packed courtroom that the Supreme Court had entered new territory for which there was no precedent.

A hundred years later, United States v. Shipp has faded into the haze of precedent and history, but le­gal historians say its impact remains undiminished. Shipp has been cited as the genesis of federal ha­be­as corpus actions in state criminal cases. The case also was a pivotal turning point in asserting the importance of the rule of law and the need for an independent judiciary.

“In countries all over the world, the United States is helping develop legal systems similar to ours,” says Thomas E. Baker, a constitutional law professor at the Flori­da International Uni­versity College of Law in Miami. “But the one thing that has been most difficult to teach is respect for the law. We had to learn it the hard way. There is no better example, there is no clearer symbolic pre­cedent of establishing and enforcing the rule of law than this case.”

But despite its legal importance, Shipp provided the climax to an amazing story involving a cast of memorable characters—perhaps most of all two unknown African-American lawyers who, because of their tenacity and bravery, changed the U.S. justice system. As a reward for their efforts, those two lawyers saw their cli­ent murdered, their practices destroyed, their families threatened and their homes burned to the ground. Fearing for their lives, they never returned to their hometown after attending the Supreme Court hearing in Washington, D.C., on that spring day in 1909.