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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday April 21 2020, @09:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the keeping-it-legal dept.

Supreme Court rules non-unanimous jury verdicts unconstitutional

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that defendants in criminal trials can only be convicted by a unanimous jury, striking down a scheme that has been rejected by every state except one. The court said in a divided opinion that the Constitution requires agreement among all members of a jury in order to impose a guilty verdict.

"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," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion. "A jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict."

Oregon is the only state left in which defendants can be convicted over the dissent of up to two jurors. Louisiana recently abandoned the practice after more than a century of use.

The ruling overturns the 2016 conviction of a Louisiana man named Evangelisto Ramos. A jury by a 10-2 margin found him guilty of killing a woman in New Orleans. Two years after Ramos's conviction, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment getting rid of non-unanimous jury verdicts. The new ruling likely means that Ramos could get a new trial.

From the Ramos v. Louisiana syllabus:

In 48 States and federal court, a single juror's vote to acquit is enough to prevent a conviction. But two States, Louisiana and Oregon, have long punished people based on 10-to-2 verdicts. In this case, petitioner Evangelisto Ramos was convicted of a serious crime in a Louisiana court by a 10-to-2 jury verdict. Instead of the mistrial he would have received almost anywhere else, Ramos was sentenced to life without parole. He contests his conviction by a nonunanimous jury as an unconstitutional denial of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial.

Held: The judgment is reversed.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Wednesday April 22 2020, @04:33AM (6 children)

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 22 2020, @04:33AM (#985675)

    trial by an impartial jury

    None of these words ment unanimous at any point current or historic. While I will not argue with them that it might of been common, it might of been the law, at the time for a trial by jury to require a unanimous decision, a lot of different things were common back then.

    You might as well say that the constitution disallows DNA evidence, that jurors must only use outhouses, and the judges must start wearing wigs again or it is not a proper 1800s trial by jury and is unconstitutional. The constitution and the surrounding documents means what it says, it was not drawn up by a bunch of illiterate idiots. The PDF argues that the drafters that 1 more word was just way too long winded, that they felt that it was no obvious that jury trials must be unanimous that they intentionally cut out specifying it. What is even worse is that this idiot is using the the fact that laws hundreds of years ago stated that a jury trial must be unanimous as evidence that the writers of this amendment would obviously consider that mentioning this unanimity was redundant.

    It is self evident that this amendment was intentionally written like this to allow local and state governing bodies to use whatever method suited them best, as long as "the people" got their say in criminal justice.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by EEMac on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:14PM

    by EEMac (6423) on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:14PM (#985776)

    Can I just toss out - in any sizeable group of people, there's almost always one person who just plain won't convict?

    Stated reasons include:
      * The evidence wasn't perfect like on TV shows
      * I don't believe anything police say, ever
      * That lawyer seemed too slick
      * The defendant looks too nice to do something like that
      * Well, maybe they did it, but everyone deserves a second chance
      * Nobody should be punished for crime - we need to think of ways to help them

    My husband has been on juries and heard stuff like this. Jurors who are interviewed later say things like this. If one of these people is on the jury, there's just no way to get a unanimous conviction.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2020, @05:49PM (#985795)

    The Constitution does not explicitly state that criminal convictions must be unanimous. However, the Supreme Court has interpreted the due process clause to require that criminal convictions apply the standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. An early discussion of this is in Miles v. United States (1880) [cornell.edu]. The In re Winship (1970) [cornell.edu] ruling explicitly states that the due process clauses of the fifth and fourteenth amendments require that criminal convictions satisfy the standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This is a fundamental principle of our legal system.

    The sixth amendment guarantees the right to trial by jury in all criminal trials. Because of the fourteenth amendment, this right has been incorporated and applies in criminal trials by the states. Due process is explicitly required by the fourteenth amendment. This means that all criminal trails by the states must also adhere to the standard of reasonable doubt to convict.

    Patton v. United States (1930) [cornell.edu] discusses the common law basis for jury trials, including the size of the jury and the requirement of unanimity for criminal convictions. While this is not the original basis for requiring a unanimous verdict for criminal convictions, it references prior cases that had already established this standard.

    The common law argument is compelling, but the standard of requiring guilt beyond a reasonable doubt also should require unanimity. If a single juror finds that there is sufficient doubt so as to refuse to convict, then that should mean there is reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.

    • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Wednesday April 22 2020, @09:55PM

      by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Wednesday April 22 2020, @09:55PM (#985874)

      requiring guilt beyond a reasonable doubt also should require unanimity

      No, there is very little statistical difference between 85% of the jury being fairly certain and 100% of the jury being fairly certain. I could see an argument that only requiring 50% or 51% for a conviction runs afoul of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" clause but requiring over 80% is the same as requiring 100% within reasonable error bounds. But also I was not commenting on these amendments, I focused specifically on their claims that the Sixth Amendment guaranteed unanimous juries. Which I think we both agree is ridiculous and obviously false?

      common law basis

      I am not talking about common law, I am talking about the constitution and on what the drafters meant by what they wrote in it. But on the topic, does the constitution require all states to follow the same common law?

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 24 2020, @01:13AM (2 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Friday April 24 2020, @01:13AM (#986322) Journal

    There is a HUGE difference between reading things in that were never written and interpreting things that were written as they were understood at the time of writing. At the time of writing for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a jury was understood by the writers to be twelve people and requiring a unanimous decision.

    • (Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Friday April 24 2020, @01:31AM (1 child)

      by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Friday April 24 2020, @01:31AM (#986334)

      No. There is no evidence, and much to the contrary, that people in the 17 hundreds did not find a non unanimous jury as inconceivable. For one the unanimous rule is only applied to criminal cases, civil jury trials are very commonly majority verdict only all over America, and the world.

      Secondly, we have a lot of the rejected drafts and documents surrounding the amendments, we know they considered putting unanimous rule in, and rejected the idea. So we literally know that the drafters of the sixth amendment were aware that unanimous was not a redundant word.

      Secondly, juries come in all sizes and they always have. It does not matter what year, what state, what country you look in, you find juries of many different sizes.

      • (Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 24 2020, @02:29AM

        by sjames (2882) on Friday April 24 2020, @02:29AM (#986360) Journal

        We know that they were familiar with the common law and supported it. We also know that it matches well with the expressed sentiment that it's better for 10 guilty men to go free than to convict one innocent. It also fits well with beyond reasonable doubt a juror voting not-guilty clearly has a doubt and since the jury cannot be cross examined, we must assume the doubt to be reasonable (else we invalidate any finding of any jury)

        .