Entries - Entry Category: Laws and Court Cases - Starting with H

The U.S. Supreme Court heard only one case from Arkansas among several important antitrust lawsuits during the Progressive Era, a time when many states were waging crusades against big-business monopolies: Hammond Packing Company v. Arkansas, 212 U.S. 322 (1909). The state won, and the Court’s decision provided a remedy for corporate obstruction in the discovery phase of litigation and established an important precedent that became a cornerstone of Rule 37 in Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Using a 1905 Arkansas antitrust law, Robert L. Rogers, who was the state’s attorney general, and Lewis Rhoton, prosecuting attorney in Pulaski County, waged numerous antitrust lawsuits. Several were aimed at the so-called “Beef Trust,” seeking penalties ranging from $30,000 to $7 million, as …

On February 3, 1922, an African American man named John Henry Harrison was lynched in Malvern (Hot Spring County) for allegedly harassing white women and girls. He had been arrested, taken to his victims for identification, and then jailed. Sheriff D. S. Bray, fearing mob violence, decided to take Harrison to the jail in Arkadelphia (Clark County) for safekeeping. Finding the roads out of town intentionally blocked by cars, he decided to travel by train instead. Bray, Harrison, and two deputies (S. J. Leiper and W. T. Gammel) boarded the train around 10:30 p.m., and Harrison was hidden under the seat in the “negro car.” According to the Malvern Daily Record, just as the train was beginning to leave, a …

Kit Helton was hanged on March 7, 1902, for murdering his wife—the first of three executions conducted at Van Buren (Crawford County) in 1902. Kit Helton, fifty-five, was a farmer living with his wife Ella near Lancaster (Crawford County). Helton suspected his wife was having an affair with Justice of the Peace John O’Kelley. On September 28, 1901, Helton rode to O’Kelley’s house and paid him fifty cents he owed him over some business. Helton said, “That settles our fruit deal; I will also settle another score with you,” before pulling a pistol and shooting him in the abdomen. Initial reports said O’Kelley was killed, but he survived his wounds. Helton then rode home and called his wife out of …

Lathe Hembree was hanged on July 25, 1902, at Center Point (Howard County) for a murder he denied committing. He was one of six men executed on the same date in Arkansas. On March 1, 1900, W. M. Willis, an inspector and paymaster for the Hammond-Signor Tie Company, was found shot to death on the Pee Gee Road five miles south of Mena (Polk County). Circumstantial evidence led investigators to arrest Lathe Hembree, a white man, for the crime. He was tried in Mena and convicted of first-degree murder on March 17 after the jury deliberated “only one hour.” He was sentenced to hang on May 18. Hembree’s lawyers appealed the conviction, and the Arkansas Supreme Court delayed the execution, …

Hodges v. United States, 203 U.S. 1 (1906) is a U.S. Supreme Court case resulting in the overturning of the convictions of three white men convicted in 1903 of conspiring to prevent a group of African-American workers from holding jobs in a lumber mill in Whitehall (Poinsett County), a small town in northeastern Arkansas. It was overruled by another Supreme Court decision in 1968, but the decision in Hodges represented an important step in the evolving judicial interpretation of the constitutional amendments passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. The Court’s decision imposed a strict limitation on the application of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime), as well …

In the landmark Arkansas case Holt v. Sarver, inmates of the racially segregated Cummins Farm and Tucker Intermediate Reformatory units of the Arkansas prison system brought suit against the commissioner of corrections, Robert Sarver, and the Arkansas Board of Corrections, challenging their conditions of confinement. The case was heard in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Pine Bluff Division, before Chief Judge J. Smith Henley. Holt v. Sarver was a turning point in the history of court intervention in the management of American prisons. The decision marked the end of the “hands-off” era of the federal judiciary toward prisoners and the beginning of an era of prisoners’ rights. Holt v. Sarver, which inspired the 1980 film …

The Homestead Act of 1862 was a federal statute that regulated most federal transfers of land to Arkansans after the Civil War. It required two things of homesteaders: settlement and cultivation. In other words, homesteaders had to live on and farm their land, and, in exchange, they received land at a very low cost. These land transfers comprised more than eight million Arkansas acres, nearly a quarter of the state’s land, for nearly 75,000 applicants. Just about half (4,037,291 acres of 8,133,791 acres) was transferred in the twentieth century. As the railroads made more of Arkansas accessible, more and more Arkansans homesteaded land. In contrast to the Southern Homestead Act—which was in force during the Reconstruction years only from 1866 …

Hopkins v. Jegley is an ongoing legal challenge to four abortion restrictions passed by the Arkansas state legislature in 2017. Unless Roe v. Wade (1973) is overturned before the case is settled, women’s abilities to continue to exercise their right to access legal abortion in Arkansas likely depend on the outcome of this case. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe, opponents of the legal right to abortion have pursued legislation aimed at restricting access to the procedure. As these efforts have escalated since 2011, states have enacted more than 450 new abortion restrictions, which disproportionally impact the lives of young people, people with low incomes, and minorities. Anti-choice state lawmakers support measures that are designed to ban specific …

On November 13, 1919, Virgil Housely was convicted of arson and sentenced to two years in an Arkansas prison for his alleged role in the March 29, 1919, attack on the African American settlement of Little Georgia (Garland County). Housley’s conviction was later overturned by the Arkansas Supreme Court. On the evening of March 29, 1919, six or seven men gathered to attack the African American residents of Little Georgia, possibly in hopes of seizing valuable farmland. They swept through the town, firing guns, setting fire to homes with torches, and throwing dynamite. After the incident, most Black families fled Little Georgia, and it was not until the end of May that authorities were able to identify and arrest six …