One of two slavery laws aimed at easy incarceration of African-Americans could be changed if a bill by State Senator J. P. Morrell of New Orleans is successful.
It’s Senate Bill 243 and if it passes, the legislature could be on the ballot this year and finally bury an old “reconstruction re-enslavement law” that has resulted in the wrongful convictions of thousands of blacks and poor whites for over a century.
Presently, in Louisiana, there are several “reconstruction” laws on the books that were designed to make it easier to re-enslave blacks after the passage of the 13th amendment to the Constitution.
As the Civil War came to a close, President Abraham Lincoln pushed the 13th amendment through the Congress. It had a unique twist. It abolished slavery in the United States but allowed a person to be re-enslaved if he/she was convicted of a crime.
The exact words of the 13th amendment are: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Once ratified the Southern States latched on to the amendment and began to pass laws to make it extremely easy to imprison former slaves.
Called the “Black Codes”, the laws were so minute that a former slave could be re-enslaved if he refused to work or if he stood idly on a street corner. Once arrested for the “crime” it would be easy to convict him because Southern States only required 9 out of 12 members of a jury to vote guilty.
The idea of a non-unanimous jury conviction became a part of the Louisiana Constitution in 1898, along with the “Grandfather Clause” which prohibited voting if a person’s grandfather was a slave.
Thousands of blacks were re-enslaved in Louisiana, and many were legally lynched by juries who found them guilty of not working or standing idle on a street corner. Cash fines were required and those who could not pay the fines were sent to “Angola” where they worked on the 18,000 acre plantation without pay. They were re-enslaved.
Judges sentenced suspects to years of imprisonment “at hard labor” almost ordering them to be re-enslaved.
When the constitution was revised in 1974 the question of removing the old slave laws was barely addressed and remains to this day a part of the state’s constitution. There was one change, it increased the required number of jurors for a conviction from nine to ten.
Angola Prison, named after the African country where most of Louisiana’s black slaves came from, presently is the largest maximum security prison in the United States with more than 6,300 prisoners, most of whom were convicted by non-unanimous juries.
Senator Morrell’s proposal before the legislature proposes to ask Louisiana voters to change the constitution and require a unanimous verdict for a felony conviction.
It would appear that in 2018 this would be a no-brainer, but it isn’t. Law enforcement organizations and district attorneys across the state don’t want it. It would be harder to convict a suspect. Under present law, a suspect could be convicted even if there is a reasonable doubt, but the new law would require a conviction only if there is no “reasonable doubt.” All 12 jurors must agree.
Senator Morrell is not the first African-American legislator to try to get the old slave laws changed. In the past, all challenges have failed.
Ironically, in Louisiana, a six-person jury must render a unanimous verdict, and death penalty cases required a unanimous verdict, but all other felony crimes require only ten out of 12 jurors to convict.
Hopefully, Senator Morrell will be successful in correcting this wrong and close this ugly chapter of Louisiana Slave history forever.
