How a Black teenager and his young lawyer changed America’s criminal justice system.

Louisiana Sate Supreme Court Building. Photo by NolanWebb via Wikimedia Commons

Picture this: You’re nineteen years old, it’s a summer afternoon, and you’re driving around your hometown. You notice a group of other teenagers on the side of the road. As you get closer you realize that two of them are your cousin and nephew. You can tell by body language that things are getting heated, tempers are flaring. So you pull over. You get out of your car. You step in between your family and the other teenagers that are trying to fight them, and in the process you put your hand on the other kid’s arm.

One more thing: you are Black, and the kid who just touched on the arm is white. Also, it’s 1966 and you live in Louisiana.

So you get arrested and charged with simple battery, a misdemeanor. In 1960’s Louisiana, it means you won’t get a jury trial, you won’t get that chance to tell your side of the story to a jury of your peers. Instead, your case is going to be decided by just one man. And that man just happens to be Leander Perez, one of the most virulent white supremacists in the American South. For the crime of simple battery you could go to prison for two years.

This is the story of Gary Duncan.

Instead of accepting his fate, he found a lawyer named Richard Sobol and they appealed. The case made its way to the Supreme Court in Duncan v. Louisiana.

Matthew Van Meter, author of Deep Delta Justice, explains how Gary Duncan’s case changed the criminal justice system. While most Americans assume that criminal cases are decided by a jury, Louisiana and many other states did not require a jury. This is because even though the Constitution guaranteed citizens the right to a jury trial, that only applied to federal crimes at the time. This essentially gave judges, who were predominantly white and beholden to racist laws, the ability to decide the future of people like Gary Duncan. According to Matthew Van Meter, this is just one example of how the criminal justice system has been used to uphold white supremacy.

Thanks to Gary Duncan’s case, the Supreme Court ruled that jury trials are fundamental to American justice, and that all states were obligated to provide them. In spite of this victory, jury trials have all but disappeared in the United States.