Coleman v. Alabama

The petitioner, a Negro convicted and sentenced to death for murdering a white man, attacks his conviction as violative of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. He claims that, as a result of a long-established practice in the county of his conviction, Negroes were arbitrarily and systematically excluded from sitting on the grand jury which indicted him and the petit jury which convicted him. The State answers that the claim comes too late, having been asserted for the first time by a motion for a new trial. Code of Ala. (1958 Recomp.), Tit. 15, §§ 278,…