ERASED
Ruffin v. Commonwealth
62 Va. (21 Gratt.) 790 (1871) · 1871
Six years after the 13th Amendment, a state supreme court named what the punishment clause had really preserved.
“He is for the time being the slave of the state.”
The Ruling
Woody Ruffin, a Black convict leased by the Virginia penitentiary to work on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, killed a guard during an escape attempt and was tried in a county where he had no jury of his peers. The Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, holding that a convicted prisoner had forfeited not only his liberty but every personal right except those the state, in its discretion, chose to extend. The opinion announced what would become the 'hands-off' doctrine governing American prison law for the next century.
The Personhood Argument Not Made
Ruffin is the doctrinal mate of the 13th Amendment's punishment clause. Six years after slavery was supposedly abolished, a state high court declared, in plain terms, that conviction reinstates the master-slave relation with the state as master. This is not metaphor; it is the legal status the court identified. The carceral system did not stumble into producing partial-personhood — it was given the formula in 1871 and the federal courts spent the next ninety years refusing to look inside the prisons that operated on it.
The Execution Gap Created
The 'slave of the state' doctrine governed federal court treatment of prisoners' constitutional claims through roughly 1964 (Cooper v. Pate). During that 93-year hands-off period, every Eighth, First, and Fourteenth Amendment claim brought by a prisoner was, as a matter of practice, non-justiciable. The convict-leasing system the doctrine licensed killed prisoners at rates that in some Southern states exceeded antebellum slave mortality — and produced no federal remedy.
Primary sources & research
Related cases
Part of The Personhood Prism, the companion to The Execution Gap by Thomas William Hornig. See all personhood cases →