No Easy Transfers To Federal Courts

The mere pursuit of civil rights, said the U.S. Supreme Court with unexpected sternness last week, does not give an individual a license to break the law. The ruling came in the case of 29 demonstrators who had been arrested in Mississippi in 1964 (Greenwood v. Willie Peacock et al.), for such offenses as parading without a permit, obstructing traffic and biting a policeman.

Contending that they could not expect fair treatment in Mississippi, the 29 had petitioned for removal of their cases to federal jurisdiction. The court, which has long since demonstrated its sympathy for the civil rights movement, was well aware that such removal has become an important civil rights weapon. More than a thousand similar cases have been removed from local Southern courts to the presumably fairer federal benches. Nonetheless, said Justice Potter Stewart for the majority, until Congress changes the situation, "no federal law confers an absolute right on private citizens--on civil rights advocates, on Negroes, or on anybody else"--to disobey valid local ordinances.

Under existing law, "it is not enough," Stewart emphasized, that state officials have acted "illegally and corruptly," that "the charges against the defendant are false," or that the defendant will not get a fair trial. If people "are being prosecuted on baseless charges solely because of their race, then there has been an outrageous denial of their federal rights, and the federal courts are far from powerless to redress the wrongs done to them."

Ultimate Vindication. In essence, that meant that federal courts in a variety of circumstances will continue to review state court convictions just as they have in the past. But pretrial intervention will continue to be a rare tactic. There are, added Stewart, specific situations in which such intervention is permitted. One of them grows out of the public-accommodation section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Georgia v. Rachel, a separate decision announced the same day, Stewart, speaking this time for a unanimous court, held that no one may even be prosecuted in a state court for peacefully trying to integrate a public accommodation covered by the 1964 act. If anyone is, his case may immediately be removed to a federal court.

On behalf of Dissenters Earl Warren, William Brennan and Abe Fortas, Justice William O. Douglas argued that the defendants in the Greenwood case should also have been allowed removal. The federal courts can and do eventually overturn unjust state decisions, he conceded, but such ultimate vindication, he added wryly, comes only if defendants "persevere, live long enough, and have the patience and the funds to carry their cases for some years through the state courts to this court."

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