LOVING v.

VIRGINIA
Date: June 12, 1967
Petitioners: Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving
Respondent: State of Virginia
FACTS:
In June 1958, Mildred Jeter, a Negro woman, and Richard
Loving, a white man, were married in the District of Columbia.
They did so because they couldnt marry each other in their
home state, Virginia, where interracial marriages were
prohibited pursuant to the states anti-miscegenation statutes.
Upon their return to Virginia from DC, they were indicted for
violating the states ban on interracial marriages, specifically
Sections 258 (Leaving State to evade law) and 259 (Punishment
for marriage) of the Virginia Code. The Lovings pleaded guilty
to the charge and were sentenced to one year in jail. The trial
judge, however, suspended the sentence for 25 years so long as
the Lovings leave the state and not return together for 25 years.
The Lovings acquiesced to the condition and went to live
together in DC for four years, until they filed a motion in the
Virginia state trial court to vacate the previous ruling and set
aside the sentence on the ground that the anti-miscegenation
statutes which they had violated were contrary to the Fourteenth
Amendment. Their motion was not heard. Thereafter they
instituted a class action requesting that a court be convened to
declare the said statutes unconstitutional. The state trial judge
denied the motion. Never giving up, the Lovings filed for an
appeal before the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, which
later on upheld the constitutionality of the states antimiscegenation statutes.

Failing to achieve their end, the Lovings filed for an appeal

before the US Supreme Court.
ISSUE:
Whether or not Virginias ban on interracial marriages was
violative of the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the
Fourteenth Amendment.
HELD:
Yes, the Court ruled that Virginias anti-miscegenation statutes
were unconstitutional. As such, the earlier convictions on the
couple were ordered to be reversed.
In arguing that the said statues were not violative of the Equal
Protection Clause, counsels for the state of Virginia argued that
penal laws containing an interracial element as part of the
offense were applied equally to whites and Negroes, and that the
State had the discretion to adopt its own policies in the process
of legislating its laws.
The Court ruled, however, that equal application does not
absolve the state of Virginia from disregarding the Fourteenth
Amendment, and that the mere presence of distinctions drawn
according to race in the questioned statutes had effectively
rendered these statutes unconstitutional. The Court regarded
these distinctions as "odious to a free people whose institutions
are founded upon the doctrine of equality" and that if they
should be upheld, they must be shown to be necessary to the
accomplishment of some permissible state objective,
independent of the racial discrimination which it was the object
of the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate.
In addition, the Court ruled that the assailed statutes have
deprived the Lovings of liberty without due process in violation

of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The

Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to
marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations.
According to the Court, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a
person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be
infringed by the State.