The Supreme Court freed Muhammad Ali 8-0 on June 28, 1971 — but 5 of the 8 justices first voted to send him to prison.

On June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Muhammad Ali's draft-refusal conviction in Clay v. United States, an 8-0 ruling that began as a 5-3 vote to send him to prison.

On June 28, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Muhammad Ali's conviction for refusing military induction. The vote was 8-0, delivered as a brief, unsigned per curiam opinion, reported at 403 U.S. 698. The case carried his legal name, Cassius Marsellus Clay, Jr., and it ended a four-year ordeal that had stripped him of his heavyweight title and nearly cost him prison time.

But the unanimity was an illusion of the final page. According to SCOTUSblog's 2016 account, "The story of Cassius Clay v. United States," five of the eight justices who heard the case first voted to affirm — to let the conviction, and the five-year sentence, stand. The 8-0 reversal that reads so cleanly in the United States Reports was the product of a quiet collapse behind closed doors.

Why only eight justices decided the case

The Court that heard Ali's appeal was short one member. Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice and a towering civil-rights lawyer, took no part. The reason was a conflict of interest: before joining the Court, Marshall had served as U.S. Solicitor General, the Justice Department officer who argues the government's cases before the Supreme Court. In that role he had been involved in an earlier stage of Ali's litigation — and so, as the Supreme Court Historical Society noted in its 2018 "Clay v. United States Revisited," he "recused himself because he had been the Solicitor General at an earlier stage of the case." The opinion itself records simply that "Mr. Justice Marshall took no part in the consideration or decision."

That left eight. At the justices' private conference after oral argument on April 19, 1971, the initial tally ran 5-3 against Ali. Had it held, the champion would have gone to prison.

How a losing case became a unanimous win

The turn came on a technicality — but a decisive one. Ali had claimed conscientious-objector status as a minister of the Nation of Islam, arguing his faith forbade him from fighting in a war not sanctioned by Allah. The Justice Department had advised Ali's draft board to reject the claim, asserting his objection was neither sincere, nor religiously based, nor an objection to all war.

The problem was that the government had, in fact, conceded two of those three points. The Department of Justice acknowledged that Ali's beliefs were sincere and religiously grounded; it rested its case only on the argument that he objected selectively, not to all wars. But the draft board had given no reason at all for denying his claim. The Court could not tell whether the board had relied on the one valid ground or on the two the government had already abandoned. With the record that murky, the justices held, the conviction could not stand.

Justice John Marshall Harlan II, the account in the Supreme Court Historical Society's quarterly recounts, had been assigned to write the majority opinion upholding the conviction. As a clerk pressed him to actually read the Nation of Islam's teachings, Harlan changed his mind. His switch broke the majority and threatened to splinter the Court into warring opinions. To avoid a messy, divided result that might have looked like the Court endorsing or condemning Ali's religion, the justices settled on the narrow, unsigned per curiam — a decision everyone could join. The vote became 8-0.

The vivid detail is in what Ali got, and what he didn't. The ruling freed him, but it set no broad precedent on selective conscientious objection; it decided one man's case on the government's own mistake.

And that is the seam still open to argue. Was Clay v. United States a landmark for religious liberty and conscience — or a lawyerly escape hatch that let the Court duck the harder question entirely? The opinion gave Ali his freedom. It gave the law almost nothing.