Hoyt v. Florida

Appellant
Gwendolyn Hoyt
Appellee
State of Florida
Appellant's Claim
That a Florida law providing that women could serve on juries only at their own request deprived criminal defendants in the state from equal protection ofthe laws.
Chief Lawyer for Appellant
Herbert B. Ehrmann
Chief Lawyer for Appellee
George R. Georgieff
Justices for the Court
Hugo Lafayette Black, William J. Brennan, Jr., Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, John Marshall Harlan II (writing for the Court), Potter Stewart, Earl Warren, Charles Evans Whittaker
Justices Dissenting
None
Place
Washington, D.C.
Date of Decision
20 November 1961
Decision
The Court upheld the Florida statute, as well as Gwendolyn Hoyt's conviction.
Significance
Hoyt v. Florida confirmed the gender bias inherent in the law in the early 1960s, ruling that women could be kept from serving on juries if statesfelt that their exclusion was warranted.
Gwendolyn Hoyt was convicted of second-degree murder in state court in Hillsborough County, Florida. She had killed her husband with a baseball bat following an argument over his infidelity. The fight resulted when he refused her offer of forgiveness. At her trial, Hoyt pleaded temporary insanity. She was tried before an all-male jury, which resulted from a Florida law that providedthat women could serve as jurors only if they specifically requested to be put on the jury rolls (only ten women appeared on the list of ten thousand jurors eligible to serve in Hillsborough County at the time of Hoyt's trial). After she was found guilty, Hoyt appealed to the Florida Supreme Court, declaring that because none of the eligible women served on the jury that convictedher, she had been deprived of her Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection under the law. Hoyt alleged that female jurors would have better understood her plight and would, therefore, have acted as more reliable determiners of her temporary insanity defense than men.
When the state supreme court upheld her conviction, Hoyt appealed her case tothe U.S. Supreme Court. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Harlan beganby reciting a truism of constitutional law, making it clear that women were not granted additional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment:

[T]heright to an impartially selected jury assured by the Fourteenth Amendment .. . does not entitle one accused of a crime to a jury tailored to the circumstances of the particular case . . . It requires only that the jury be indiscriminately drawn from among those eligible in the community for jury service .. .

Unfortunately, this truism fell short of explaining why the jury that tried Gwendolyn Hoyt contained no women. As the Supreme Court had itself recognized15 years earlier, in Ballard v. United States (1946), a fair cross section of the community--as represented by a jury--would almost certainly include women.
Court Upholds Double Standard Regarding Jury Service
Instead of following the implications of the Court's ruling in Ballard, the nine justices who ruled against Hoyt fell back on sexual stereotypes inupholding the Florida jury statute:

Despite the enlightened emancipation of women from the restrictions and protections of bygone years . . .[a] woman is still regarded as the center of home and family life. We cannotsay that it is constitutionally impermissible for a State . . . to conclude that a woman should be relieved from the civic duty of jury service unless sheherself determines that such service is consistent with her own special responsibilities.

It would be another 14 years before the Supreme Court would effectively overrule its holding in Hoyt with Taylor v. Louisiana (1975), in which a male defendant successfully fought his rape conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment right to be tried by a jury of his peers was violated by astate "volunteers only" jury service law that resulted in an all-male jury.Although the Court distinguished Hoyt on grounds that it had been decided on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Taylor Court found that provisions that systematically produce all-male jury panels--provisions like the one at issue in Gwendolyn Hoyt's case--are unconstitutional. This ruling was later extended in Duren v. Missouri (1979), in which the Courtoutlawed a state statute which allowed women to be exempted from jury service and which had resulted in juries that were at least 85 percent male.
Related Cases

• Ballard v. United States, 329 U.S. 187 (1946).
  
• Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522 (1975).
  
• Duren v. Missouri, 439 U.S. 357 (1979).

First Use of the Temporary Insanity Plea
The first use of the temporary insanity plea occurred in 1859 when Daniel Sickles, leader of the Democratic party, used it as his defense in the murder ofPhilip Barton Key, who had been having an affair with Sickles's wife, Teresa. Sickles's defense team tried to appeal to the "unwritten law" to make Key'smurder look like justifiable homicide.
Sickles found out about the affair between his wife and Key on 24 February 1859. Sickles had Teresa sign a detailed confession and consulted two of his political cronies for advice. Unaware that Sickles knew everything, Key tried to signal Teresa from Lafayette Park, which was across from the Sickles' house, on 27 February. Enraged, Sickles stormed out of the house and gunned Key down amongst the Sunday afternoon strollers in the park.
The high publicity surrounding the event made it difficult to locate jurors who did not sympathize with Sickles. One of Sickles's advisors, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert J. Walker, testified that Sickles was in "an agonyof despair, the most terrible thing I ever saw in my life . . . I feared if it continued he would become permanently insane."
The judge instructed the jurors that, in the eyes of the law, any delay between becoming aware of an adultery and the slaying of the adulterer by an enraged husband made the killing deliberate murder, or at the very least manslaughter. On 26 April 1859, the jury returned a not guilty verdict.
Sources
Knappman, Edward W., ed. Great American Trials. Detroit, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1994.