|
| |
2000s
2000: Rideau v. Louisiana threw out the 28-year-old, third conviction of Wilbert
Rideau for murder because of discrimination in the composition of the grand jury
that originally indicted him more than 40 years earlier (As of 2004 he is still
facing a fourth trial).
2000: Smith v. United States was resolved when President Clinton commuted the
sentence of Kemba Smith. Smith was a young African-American mother whose
abusive, domineering boyfriend led her to play a peripheral role (she did not
sell drugs but was aware of the selling) in a conspiracy to obtain and
distribute crack cocaine. She had been sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 24½
years in prison even though she was a first-time offender.
2000: Cromartie v. Hunt and Daly v. Hunt said that it is legal to create, for
partisan political reasons, a district with a high concentration of minority
voters; hence the North Carolina district from which Mel Watt was elected to the
House of Representatives was ruled not to be an illegal gerrymander.
2003: Gratz v. Bollinger In a defeat for the LDF, the Supreme Court overturned a
lower court's rejection of a white student's challenge to undergraduate
admissions procedures at the University of Michigan, which took race into
account in order to admit a diverse entering class of students.
| |
|
