| Summary: | Hooper, a free man of colour, and Suttles, a white woman, were indicted in 1842 for adultery. Their defence was that they had been married for ten years. The jury was directed to determine whether or not the marriage was valid; they found that Hooper and Suttles had married before an act of 1838 that prohibited marriage between white people and free people of colour and so the couple were acquitted, whereupon the state appealed. In the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Ruffin pointed out that the marriage had violated a similar statute dating from 1830, and ordered the verdict reversed.
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