A divided Supreme Court of Louisiana ruled that a ban on nonunanimous jury verdicts will not be applied retroactively, which means up to 1,500 inmates who were convicted by split juries will not get a new trial.
One justice dissented, and another dissented in part.
The Louisiana high court ruled that retrying those already convicted by less-than-unanimous juries in the state would impose too great an administrative burden on the courts and was not required by the state constitutional amendment voters approved in 2018 requiring unanimous jury verdicts going forward.
The amendment approved by voters has “prospective effect only,” Justice Scott Crichton, a Republican, wrote for the court.
“The solemn decision of the people should not be disturbed by the judiciary, whose role as a co-equal branch of government is to interpret the laws, not to announce policy more rightfully reserved to the legislature,” he wrote.
Justice Piper Griffin, a Democrat, wrote in her dissent that bureaucratic inconvenience should not stand in the way of justice.
“The imperative to correct past injustices manifest in the deprivation of a constitutionally guaranteed right should not cede to reliance interests and administrative concerns,” she wrote.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a Republican, had argued that retrying cases involving nonunanimous verdicts would swamp the court system.
The state proceeding came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on April 20, 2020, in Ramos v. Louisiana that the practice in Louisiana and Oregon of allowing criminal convictions with a less-than-unanimous jury verdict violated the Constitution’s guarantee of a right to a jury trial. Before the decision, in 48 states and federal court, a single juror’s vote to acquit was enough to prevent a conviction, but Louisiana and Oregon imprisoned people as a result of 10-to-2 verdicts.
Writing for the court at the time, Justice Neil Gorsuch stated that “the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial—as incorporated against the States by way of the Fourteenth Amendment—requires a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense.”
Gorsuch wrote that the practice of allowing nonunanimous convictions was rooted in past racial animus.
“Courts in both Louisiana and Oregon have frankly acknowledged that race was a motivating factor in the adoption of their States’ respective nonunanimity rules,” he wrote.
“Louisiana first endorsed nonunanimous verdicts for serious crimes at a constitutional convention in 1898.
“According to one committee chairman, the avowed purpose of that convention was to ‘establish the supremacy of the white race,’ and the resulting document included many of the trappings of the Jim Crow era: a poll tax, a combined literacy and property ownership test, and a grandfather clause that in practice exempted white residents from the most onerous of these requirements.”
But a year later, the nation’s highest court refused to make the ruling retroactive.
On May 17, 2021, in the case in Edwards v. Vannoy, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Ramos jury-unanimity rule does not apply retroactively on federal collateral review, as opposed to during a routine direct appeal to a higher state-level court. Collateral review, which usually happens when state-level appeals have been exhausted, is when a defendant asks a federal court to revisit his conviction to determine if his constitutional rights were violated.
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