Case: Pullum and United States v. Greene

On June 23, 1966, a group of Black citizens of Terrell County, Georgia, represented by private counsel, filed a class action lawsuit against the members of the Terrell County jury commission in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia. The plaintiffs alleged that Black residents had been illegally excluded from jury service, that the juries did not represent a cross-section of all qualified people as is constitutionally required, and that Black residents had been deliberately excluded from serving as jury commissioners. This case was assigned to District Judge Robert Elliot. 

Georgia law required that the Jury Commission use the segregated tax digest as the exclusive source of names for jurors. For at least 20 years prior to this suit, no Black resident had ever served on a jury, despite the county being 55% Black. The plaintiffs alleged that this amounted to a violation of equal protection under the 14th amendment. The plaintiffs sought injunctive relief requiring the County to develop new, representative juror lists. 

On September 1, 1966, the United States was granted leave to intervene in the case. The United States alleged that the commission engaged in the systematic exclusion of Black residents from jury service. The United States sought to convene a three judge court and to amend its complaint to challenge the Georgia statute which required the tax digest to be the source of the juror names. Judge Elliot denied this motion, finding that the tax digests included enough Black residents that the commission could secure a representative cross section.

In response to this suit, the Georgia Legislature amended the Georgia Code, so that it no longer mandated that jury names be sourced from the tax digest. This amendment required jury commissioners to compose a new jury list which would be a fair cross section of “upright and intelligent” citizens by drawing names from the voting list. 

After this change, the defendants moved to dismiss the case on the grounds that the changes to the state law had mooted the case. The district court granted the motion to dismiss, finding that since names were no longer sourced from the tax list, the relief the plaintiffs requested had been obtained. 

The plaintiffs then appealed the case, arguing that the district court had erred by failing to find that defendants had pursued a longstanding pattern and practice of discrimination against Black residents in compiling jury lists in Terrell County,  failing to find that the pattern and practice of racial discrimination continued to and through the time of the hearing and defendants’ motion to dismiss and  refusing to issue an injunction against defendants and in granting their motion to dismiss. The United States cited as an error the district court’s refusal to grant the injunction given the fact that the defendants had failed to prove that they had abandoned their discriminatory practices.

The Fifth Circuit Court reversed the District Court’s ruling that the complaint was moot, finding that the District Court mischaracterized the plaintiff’s complaint by failing to recognize that the plaintiffs were challenging the pattern of racial discrimination and exclusion from the jury system, not the use of the tax digest as a source of the names. Circuit Judge Tuttle went on to hold that the plaintiff had proven that discrimination had taken place, noting  that despite the statutory change, only 13.1% of the new jury list was Black. Thus, he held that injunctive relief is plainly required, both to prohibit discriminatory behavior and affirmatively ensure that action was taken to create a representative jury list. 396 F.2d 251.