By Ken Armstrong for The Marshall Project, a non-profit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. For more information —- and a free daily news roundup — visit TheMarshallProject.org or follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
Time is not always kind to the people whose names get attached to landmark legal cases. Ernesto Miranda, the defendant whose 1966 Supreme Court case forced police to inform suspects of their basic rights (“You have the right to remain silent…”) was stabbed to death in a skid-row bar. Clarence Gideon won a 1963 Supreme Court case, Gideon v. Wainwright, that established the right of poor defendants to court-appointed lawyers. When he died a decade later the former mayor of his hometown recalled him as a “no-good punk.” It fell to the American Civil Liberties Union to put a marker on his grave.
Before the Gideon ruling, before Miranda , there was Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Supreme Court decision some legal scholars credit with launching a “due process revolution” in American law. The Mapp ruling changed policing in America by requiring state courts to throw out evidence if it had been seized illegally. The woman behind the ruling, Dollree “Dolly” Mapp, died six weeks ago in a small town in Georgia, with virtually no notice paid. She was 91, as best we can tell.
Mapp’s life was as colorful and momentous as her death was quiet. She went from being a single teenage mother in Mississippi to associating with renowned boxers and racketeers in Cleveland to making her way in New York City, where she launched one business after another. “Some of them were legitimate, and some of them were whatever they were,” said her niece, Carolyn Mapp, who looked after her aunt in her final years. Along the way she tangled with police, and when she stood up to them in Cleveland – a black woman, staring down a phalanx of white officers in the 1950s – she made history.
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