Ruffin v. Commonwealth.
62 Va. (21 Gratt.) 790 (1871). Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. Decided November 1871.
Historical authority, superseded in its premise. The premise that a convicted person forfeits all rights and stands outside the Bill of Rights was abandoned by the federal courts in the twentieth century: Coffin v. Reichard, 143 F.2d 443 (6th Cir. 1944); Cooper v. Pate, 378 U.S. 546 (1964); and Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 555 to 556 (1974), which held that there is "no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country." Ruffin is cited today for what courts once said, not for what they hold.
Ruffin v. Commonwealth, 62 Va. (21 Gratt.) 790 (1871).
Copy the line above. Pinpoint pages are given beside each holding and passage.
What the court was asked.
Woody Ruffin, a convict in the Virginia penitentiary, had been hired out under an Act of April 23, 1870 to work on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. In Bath County, attempting to escape, he killed a guard, Louis F. Swats. He was tried in the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond before a Richmond jury, convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. He sought a writ of error.
The question. Whether trying a penitentiary convict before a Richmond jury, rather than a jury of the county where the offense occurred, violated the Virginia Bill of Rights' guarantee of a jury of the vicinage.
The holding, with pinpoint pages
The statutes giving the Richmond circuit court jurisdiction over offenses committed by penitentiary convicts do not contravene the Bill of Rights. A convict is "in the eye of the law" always in the penitentiary, wherever he is carried by authority of law, and his vicinage is the penitentiary. Judgment affirmed.
Christian, J., delivered the opinion of the court. No separate opinions are reported.
"For the time being, during his term of service in the penitentiary, he is in a state of penal servitude to the State. He has, as a consequence of his crime, not only forfeited his liberty, but all his personal rights except those which the law in its humanity accords to him. He is for the time being the slave of the State. He is civiliter mortuus; and his estate, if he has any, is administered like that of a dead man."
Christian, J., for the court.
"The bill of rights is a declaration of general principles to govern a society of freemen, and not of convicted felons and men civilly dead. Such men have some rights it is true, such as the law in its benignity accords to them, but not the rights of freemen. They are the slaves of the State undergoing punishment for heinous crimes committed against the laws of the land."
Christian, J., for the court.
"He is for the time being a slave, in a condition of penal servitude to the State, and is subject to such laws and regulations as the State may choose to prescribe."
Christian, J., for the court.
What it decided, and what it did not.
The famous sentence is reasoning, not the holding. The court was deciding a venue question under a state Bill of Rights clause, and it reached the "slave of the State" language to explain why a convict could not claim a jury of the vicinage. The Thirteenth Amendment is not mentioned. The facts are a convict-leasing case: the State had hired the prisoner out to a private railroad under an 1870 statute, and the killing occurred at the work site.
Later treatment
The premise that a convicted person forfeits all rights and stands outside the Bill of Rights was abandoned by the federal courts in the twentieth century: Coffin v. Reichard, 143 F.2d 443 (6th Cir. 1944); Cooper v. Pate, 378 U.S. 546 (1964); and Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U.S. 539, 555 to 556 (1974), which held that there is "no iron curtain drawn between the Constitution and the prisons of this country." Ruffin is cited today for what courts once said, not for what they hold.
The network reads Ruffin as the plainest judicial statement of the status the punishment exception left open: a person held as "the slave of the State" and "civilly dead," leased to a private company, six years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. Later courts repudiated the rhetoric of total forfeiture without ever asking whether the powers of ownership continued to be exercised. That is the question the network's instruments measure. Ruffin is cited on this site as record, never as authority.
Text retrieved from the Caselaw Access Project reproduction on September 25, 2026 with the reporter's star pages. Comparison against the printed Grattan volume is pending; until then the quotations carry the reproduction's pagination. CourtListener's own metadata gives the citation as 21 Va. 790; the standard form is 62 Va. (21 Gratt.) 790. Corrections: info@abolishslavery.us.