WASHINGTON (CN) — Resolving an anomaly in Bill of Rights adherence, the Supreme Court held Monday that a jury's verdict must be unanimous to convict someone of a serious crime in state court.
While the requirement for unanimous verdicts at the federal level dates back to the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon, an unusual concurring opinion from Justice Lewis Powell stopped that holding from applying to the states.
Louisiana and Oregon were the only states in the country that did not require unanimous verdicts in criminal trials until 2018, when voters approved a change to the state constitutions. There is substantial historical evidence that the nonunanimous jury provision for both states arose out of a desire to suppress minorities.
Louisiana has since ended the practice, but provided no relief to Evangelisto Ramos, who was convicted of the murder of Fedison, a woman whose body was found in a trash can outside of a New Orleans church in 2014. Ramos admitted to having sex with Fedison the night before her body was found and his DNA was found on the trash can, but he has maintained his innocence throughout his case.
Mercedes Montagnes, the executive director of the Promise of Justice Institute, which represented Ramos, said the decision "offers the promise of healing for our state which has existed under the specter of this racist law for over a century."
"Today, the U.S. Supreme Court reckoned with the largest standing monument to the confederacy with this historic ruling," Montagnes said in a statement. "We are eager to make sure that Louisianans are given the full protections of the Constitution's promise and that this victory is not hallow."
After a two-day trial, a jury convicted Ramos in a 10-2 verdict. He later received a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
In 2017, the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal supported the constitutionality of nonunanimous verdicts, and the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to review the holding.
In a somewhat fractured opinion for the high court majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch was joined at least in part by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred only in the judgment, writing separately that he would have taken a different approach to avoid parsing the Sixth Amendment as Gorsuch had.
Gorsuch began his opinion by recounting the 14th century origins of the unanimous jury verdict requirement, its adoption in the United States, and the role racism played in the genesis of both Oregon and Louisiana's laws carrying on the tradition.
Writing separately, Sotomayor said the racist origins of nonunanimous jury laws are a necessary part of the court’s consideration, even though Ramos did not bring an equal protection claim.
Gorsuch meanwhile cut through Louisiana’s arguments for allowing nonunanimous juries, including its contention that James Madison’s original text of the amendment included the right to a unanimous jury, only for the condition to be dropped before ratification.
Gorsuch noted the same could be said for several other hallmarks of trial-by-jury that also fell out of the original text, suggesting those conditions, including unanimity, were so fundamental to the concept of a jury trial that they did not need to be explicitly stated.
"Taking the state's argument from drafting history to its logical conclusion would thus leave the right to a 'trial by jury' devoid of meaning," Gorsuch wrote. "A right mentioned twice in the Constitution would be reduced to an empty promise. That can't be right."
The decision has been long sought, said Hannah Cox, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty.
