Ah Sin and his Lawyers
- Ah Sin and His Lawyers
Chinese and other Asians in the United States were persistently and pervasively discriminated against from the middle of the nineteenth century until well into the civil rights era. They suffered not only at the hands of mobs and prejudiced individuals, but also from the actions of governments—national, state, and local. While explicitly discriminatory laws and ordinances were the primary form of governmental discrimination, much of the western judiciary began using existing laws to disadvantage Asians almost as soon as they appeared on the American scene. The notorious decision in People v. Hall (1854), handed down by the Know Nothing Chief Justice of California, Hugh G. Murray, was not atypical. The case involved a murderer, George W. Hall, who was convicted on the testimony of a Chinese witness. Hall’s counsel appealed the conviction arguing that an 1850 statute regulating criminal procedure, which provided that “No Black, or Mulatto person, or Indian shall be allowed to give evidence in favor of or against a white person,” should also disallow testimony from Chinese. After some rigamarole about Columbus’s confusion between American Indians and Asians, Murray found for the appellant, arguing that
[the legislature had] adopted the most comprehensive terms to embrace every known class or shade of color, as the apparent design was to protect the White person from the influence of all testimony other than that of persons of the same caste. . . . We have carefully considered all the consequences resulting from a different rule of construction, and are satisfied that even in a doubtful case we would be impelled to this decision on grounds of public policy.
The consequences of allowing Chinese to testify, Murray argued, “would admit them to all the equal rights of citizenship, and we might soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.”
Within a few years most California politicians had embarked on a crusade to inhibit or halt Chinese immigration, while others went so far as to wish all [End Page 472] Chinese expelled. The crusade quickly ran afoul of the federal courts, which had established, in the Passenger Cases (1849), that immigration was “foreign commerce,” and thus only to be regulated—except for public health provisions—by Congress. California and other western states and territories adopted special devices, such as foreign miners taxes, aimed specifically at Chinese, while municipalities taxed laundries and passed all kinds of other harassing legislation, some of it based on the special status of Chinese, and other Asians, as aliens ineligible to citizenship. Montana, for example, declared all mining claims held by such aliens null and void.
Such discrimination was based on federal statutes. The original naturalization statute of 1790 had limited the privilege to “free white persons.” Despite this, several Chinese and at least one Japanese had been naturalized by courts in the eastern United States before the Civil War. The passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution made the existing law anachronistic and in 1870 Congress extended the privilege to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent.” Charles Sumner and a few others strove to make naturalization color blind, but without success: eighty-two years would pass before that happened. In 1882, as part of the first Chinese Exclusion Act, Congress specified that “no State court or court of the United States shall admit Chinese to citizenship” and, in the Ozawa and Thind cases of 1922 and 1923 the Supreme Court ruled that other Asians, even if Caucasian, were not white.
But wholly apart from statutory provisions—the bar against Chinese testimony was lifted in 1872—in criminal cases which depended on jury verdicts it was all but impossible for Chinese to get justice. For good reason the phrase “a Chinaman’s chance” came to mean no chance at all. And the prejudice of many inferior judges—formal and informal—was notorious, as western folklore attests. The mythical Judge...
