Adams v. Texas
Case Date: 05/05/1980
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Adams v. Texas, 448 U.S. 38 (1980),[1] was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held on an 8-1 vote that, consistent with its prior opinion in Witherspoon v. Illinois, a Texas requirement that jurors swear an oath that the mandatory imposition of a death sentence would not interfere with their consideration of factual matters such as guilt or innocence during a trial was unconstitutional.
The surrounding factual issues (involving defendant Randall Dale Adams) were the subject of a partially-autobiographical book of the same name, and were featured in the movie The Thin Blue Line.
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