Crawford for Virginia

Crawford jor Virginia

On a frosty morning in January 1932 Mrs. Agnes Boeing Ilsley, sport-loving widow of a well-to-do Wisconsin banker, and her elderly white maid, Mina Buckner, were found hacked to death in their beds on Mrs. Ilsley's estate at Middleburg, Va. Wanted for the murder was George Crawford, Negro chauffeur whom Mrs. Ilsley had discharged on suspicion of stealing her liquor (TIME, May 8). A Virginia Grand Jury indicted Crawford but the police could not find him. Last January he was picked up in Boston on a petty larceny charge.

Facts were these: Shortly after Crawford was arrested, his lawyers went before the U. S. District Court of Boston's Judge James Arnold Lowell, cousin of Harvard's ex-president, and pleaded for a stay of the extradition order. Judge Lowell, an aging, flashily-dressed eccentric who was rebuked by the Supreme Court last May for telling a jury that a witness must have been lying because he nervously wiped his hands, granted their plea. His legal reasoning was that since Virginia does not permit Negroes to serve on juries, any conviction of George Crawford would be voided by the Supreme Court as contrary to the 14th amendment.* "The only persons who would get any good out of it would be the lawyers," he declared. "The whole thing is absolutely wrong. It goes against my Yankee common sense. . . . They say justice is blind but it is not as blind as a bat."

Southern resentment against the decision boiled to a climax in the House of Representatives where Virginia's Representative Howard Worth Smith started impeachment proceedings against Judge Lowell.

The U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Lowell's decision. It declared that the question whether Crawford would get a fair trial in Virginia was something which Virginia herself, and not a Federal court, had the power to decide, and that therefore Crawford should be extradited.

The case was appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court. Last week the Court refused to review it, thereby upholding the decision of the Circuit Court and, in effect, roundly snubbing Yankee Judge Lowell. George Crawford is expected to go on trial in Virginia next month.

* Negroes have served on grand and petty juries in Virginia since early reconstruction days when a Buckingham County sheriff was fined for refusing to summon negroes on juries. In practice, however, the State-wide selection of Negroes is the exception, not the rule.

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