Maryland has enacted laws that abolish the crime of which petitioners were convicted. These laws accord petitioners a right to be served in Hooper's restaurant, and make unlawful conduct like that of Hooper's president and hostess in refusing them service because of their race.***
Maryland follows the universal common law rule that, when the legislature repeals a criminal statute or otherwise removes the State's condemnation from conduct that was formerly deemed criminal, this action requires the dismissal of a pending criminal proceeding charging such conduct. The rule applies to any such proceeding which at the time of the supervening legislation, has not yet reached final disposition in the highest court authorized to review it.****
Accordingly, the Court vacated the judgment of the Maryland Court of Appeals and remanded the case to that court which, upon remand, held that the Baltimore and Maryland public accommodations statutes, along with the subsequently enacted federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, operated only prospectively and therefore could not invalidate the Hooper's sit-in demonstrators' convictions.***** However, this was not the end of the story. As Professor Reynolds notes at the conclusion of his previously cited article:
On December 14, 1964, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Hamm v. City of Rock Hill, holding that the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed abate all pending prosecutions of those who had been arrested for activity that the Act protected. Although Hamm readily appears controlling, the Court of Appeals waited nearly five months to issue an order on April 9, 1965, reversing the convictions and assessing costs against the State, thereby ending the historic case of Bell v. Maryland.******
Just over a year after the Court of Appeals issued its final order in Bell v. Maryland, Robert Mack Bell received the degree Bachelor of Arts in History from Morgan State College. Later that year he matriculated at Harvard Law School, from which he graduated with the degree Juris Doctor in 1969. He then returned to his home town, Baltimore, and was in private law practice for six years.
In 1975, Bell was appointed to the District Court of Maryland, District 1, in Baltimore City and served there until 1980. He was an Associate Judge, Baltimore City Circuit Court, 8th Judicial Circuit, from 1980 to 1984, when he was appointed to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals. Seven years later he was appointed to the state's highest court and became the chief justice in 1996. He was a member of the Court of Appeals Standing Committee on Rules of practice and Procedure from 1977 to 1982; the Commission to Revise the Annotated Code of Maryland, 1980-82; and the Board of Directors, Judicial Institute of Maryland, 1982-84. In August 2006, Bell was named Chair of the National Center for State Courts' Board of Directors. At the same time, Judge Bell also was named president of the Conference of Chief Justices.*******
In 2013 he reached the mandatory retirement age of seventy for Maryland judges. His career was significant for Black History in two ways. First, he helped to instigate and carry out a sit-in demonstration that led to litigation that clarified the legal status of such non-violent demonstrations. Second, he became the first Black Chief Justice of the Maryland Court of Appeals (now called the Maryland Supreme Court) and, in a delicious bit of irony, thereby became Chief Justice of the very court that had affirmed his conviction in 1962.
In 2008 he made this observation about how he considered the significance of his case:
I think my case has given me that point of reference, and it also makes me appreciate the extent of progress that has been made. And it also made me able to gauge the extent of the progress which has yet to be made. I think, not just about that case, but about that era in that fashion. The unfortunate thing is that younger people don't remember it. They don't know what happened. And therefore you're finding a different kind of attitude and a complacency which I think is more dangerous than anything else. So our job is pretty hard.********
I believe this observation is still relevant in 2025.
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