U.S. Supreme Court abolishes split jury verdicts; dozens of convictions voided

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that juries across the nation must be unanimous to convict or acquit a criminal defendant, outlawing the split verdicts that had persisted in Louisiana since openly racist lawmakers enshrined them in the state Constitution during the Jim Crow era.

In a splintered, 6-3 decision, the high court ruled that the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial implicitly requires a unanimous verdict, and that the need for jury consensus in federal courtrooms applies equally to state courts through the 14th Amendment.

"Wherever we might look to determine what the term 'trial by an impartial jury trial' meant at the time of the Sixth Amendment’s adoption—whether it’s the common law, state practices in the founding era, or opinions and treatises written soon afterward—the answer is unmistakable," wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in Monday's majority opinion. "A jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict."

The decision came in the case of life prisoner Evangelisto Ramos of New Orleans and immediately affects dozens of other recent criminal convictions and hundreds of pending felony prosecutions in Louisiana and Oregon, the only two states to adopt non-unanimous jury verdicts -- in 1898 and 1934, respectively.

The decision, which was anticipated by many legal scholars, appears to hand new trials to at least 44 Louisiana inmates who, like Ramos, were convicted by split juries and have not exhausted their appeals, according to defense advocates.

It came a more than a year after Louisiana voters took the initiative, sparked by a groundswell in the state Legislature, to eliminate split jury verdicts by a nearly 2-1 margin, in the first such referendum on the verdict law in its 120-year existence.

That change applied only prospectively, however, to prosecutions of crimes committed on or after Jan. 1, 2019. Left untouched by the amendment was anyone charged with or convicted of crimes committed before then.

"We are heartened that the Court has held, once and for all, that the promise of the Sixth Amendment fully applies in Louisiana, rejecting any concept of second-class justice," said Ben Cohen, an attorney at the New Orleans-based Promise of Justice Initiative who brought the case on Ramos' behalf.

Mercedes Montagnes, executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, said the high court  "reckoned with the largest standing monument to the Confederacy" in its ruling on Monday.

Anticipating Monday's ruling, the organization formed a team last fall to identify every Louisiana inmate who was convicted by a split jury -- a task often confounded by missing or sealed court records.