People v. Hall

Appealed murder case in the United States

The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall or People v. Hall, , was an appealed murder case in the 1850s, in which the California Supreme Court established that Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants had no rights to testify against white citizens. The opinion was delivered in 1854 by Chief Justice Hugh Murray with the concurrence of Justice Solomon Heydenfeldt and the dissent of Justice Alexander Wells.

In June 1867 a labor strike occurred in the Sierra Nevada mountains by Chinese workers building the Transcontinental Railroad. Because the workers had no formal rights to complain, they mounted one of the earliest instances of peaceful, Confucian style collective action in a situation where no formal civil rights exist. As written, the Section did not appear to apply to Chinese witnesses. Between 1849 and 1854, Chinese had made use of the California court systems, with varying degrees of success. For instance, Ah Toy, a woman from China who arrived at San Francisco in 1848, started a brothel in 1850, becoming the first Chinese madam operating in the United States. She attempted to use California's court system to seek justice twice:

She unsuccessfully sued a group of miners for paying her in brass filings instead of gold dust. In August 1852, she threatened to sue Yee Ah Tye, a notorious Chinese leader, for extortion, claiming that he had demanded that her prostitutes pay him a tax. Yee Ah Tye backed down, although he would later be imprisoned for other charges.

The case did not make violence against Chinese de jure legal: it was still possible to convict a white person of murdering Chinese if credible white witnesses, or other reliable evidence, could be produced. However, it de facto made it much easier for whites to get away with violence against Chinese. In April 1857, the San Francisco Evening Bulletin editorialized, "We regret this action, based as it is entirely on prejudice, and can only express our conviction that a period will ultimately arrive when it will be clear to all that the law as it stands is mischievous and prejudicial to the highest degree to the public interests." A state law passed in 1873 invalidated all testimony laws, and therefore overrode the decision in People v. Hall.