Facts
- Tony Pace, a Black man, and Mary J. Cox, a white woman, were indicted in Alabama for living together in adultery or fornication.
- Alabama prosecuted them under a statute that specifically criminalized interracial marriage or interracial adultery/fornication and imposed penitentiary or hard-labor sentences of two to seven years.
- A separate, general adultery/fornication statute applied to same-race couples and provided materially lesser penalties.
- Pace and Cox were tried, convicted, and each sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in the state penitentiary.
- The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the convictions; Pace sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing the interracial statute violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
Issues
- Whether Alabama’s statute imposing harsher penalties for interracial adultery or fornication than for the same conduct by same-race couples violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Decision
- The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the judgment upholding Pace’s conviction.
- The Court held that the statute did not deny equal protection because it punished both participants in the interracial relationship—white and Black—equally.
- The Court treated interracial adultery/fornication as a distinct offense that the state could punish more severely than same-race adultery/fornication, so long as the penalty within the interracial-offense category was the same for both races.
Legal Principles
- Equal protection in criminal justice bars imposing a greater or different punishment for the same offense on account of race.
- A statute does not violate equal protection, under the Court’s reasoning, where it applies the same punishment to each race within the defined offense.
- A state may define a separate offense based on interracial conduct and attach a higher penalty, provided the statute does not differentiate punishment between the white and Black participants in that offense.
Conclusion
The Court upheld Alabama’s harsher penalties for interracial adultery or fornication on the theory that equal protection was satisfied because the statute imposed identical punishment on both races involved, even though it created and severely punished an offense defined by racial difference.