Loving v. Virginia
Abigail Wyse
CJC-131-IN1 Criminal Law
David M. Broome
12 December 2014
Loving v. Virginia
Loving v. Virginia was a civil rights, equal protection, and due process case of the Supreme Court which struck down Virginia’s law banning interracial marriage. The Court held, “There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause”. The Court also found that the Virginia law deprived citizens of liberty without due process of law. The case touches on constitutional principles including equality, federalism, and liberty.
Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Loving, a black woman, married and were sentenced to a year in prison. Their marriage had violated the state's anti-miscegenation statute, Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as "white" and people classified as "colored". The Supreme Court decided that this prohibition was unconstitutional which ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States.
In June 1958, Richard and Mildred had become pregnant, the couple then traveled to Washington, D.C. to marry to evade the Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 which made interracial marriage a crime.…show more content… District Court after the Lovings' motion still had not been decided. The three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. However, the Virginia Supreme Court Justice ¬¬Harry L. Carrico wrote an opinion to the court which upheld the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and declared the criminal convictions permissible. Carrico argued that the case at hand was not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause because both the white and the non-white spouse were punished equally for the crime of