Taylor v. Louisiana

Effective 1 January 1975, Louisiana repealed the gender-based provision challenged by Taylor. A decision was nonetheless issued three weeks later, with Justice White pointing out in a footnote to his majority opinion that the repeal "has no effect on the conviction obtained in this case."

White briefly outlined the history of Taylor's case and the Court's jurisdiction "to consider whether the Louisiana jury-selection system deprived appellant of his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to an impartial jury." He then offered the Court's conclusion: "We hold that it did and that these amendments were violated . . . In consequence, appellant's conviction must be reversed."

Explaining the Court's reasoning, White began by agreeing that Louisiana's "jury-selection system . . . operates to exclude from jury service an identifiable class of citizens constituting 53 percent of eligible jurors in the community . . . "

White disagreed with the state's claim that the male Taylor lacked standing to challenge a lack of female jurors, writing that "there is no rule that claims such as Taylor presents may be only by those defendants who are members of the group excluded from jury service." Citing earlier court decisions and the Federal Jury Selection and Service Act of 1968, White emphasized that "the requirement of a jury's being chosen from a fair cross section of the community is fundamental to the American system of justice." That requirement, he wrote, "is violated by the systematic exclusion of women . . . "

White acknowledged that the Court had let stand a similar jury-selection system as recently as 1961, in its decision in Hoyt v. Florida. He also acknowledged that "the first Congress did not perceive the Sixth Amendment as requiring women on criminal jury panels . . . " Nonetheless, he wrote:

We think it is no longer tenable to hold that women as a class may be excluded or given automatic exemptions based solely on sex if the consequence is that criminal jury venires are almost totally male. To this extent we cannot follow the contrary implications of the prior cases, including Hoyt v. Florida. If it was ever the case that women were unqualified to sit on juries or were so situated that none of them should be required to perform jury service, that time has long since passed. If at one time it could be held that Sixth Amendment juries must be drawn from a fair cross-section of the community but that this requirement permitted the almost total exclusion of women, this is not the case today.

Taylor v. Louisiana guaranteed that the states would call women and men to jury service on an equal basis.