In 49 states and in federal court, a jury must unanimously find a defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in order to convict him of a crime. Only Oregon allows a jury to convict by a 10-2 vote and, until recently, so did Louisiana. Louisiana changed its law in 2019 to require unanimous juries, but for crimes committed before 2019, it allows a jury to convict over two dissenters. In 2016, a Louisiana jury convicted Evangelisto Ramos of second-degree murder for the 2014 killing of Trinece Fedison. While 10 jurors concluded that the state had proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, two jurors voted against conviction. That vote was sufficient to convict, and Ramos was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in Ramos’s case in October 2019. Ramos argues that his conviction by a nonunanimous jury violated the U.S. Constitution. The Sixth Amendment grants criminal defendants the right to trial “by an impartial jury.” Nearly 50 years ago, the Supreme Court considered whether the Sixth Amendment jury right includes a right to a unanimous jury in a state criminal trial (Apodaca v. Oregon, 1972), but the court was fractured. Four of the nine justices concluded that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimity and four justices concluded that it does not. The remaining justice—Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr.—concluded that the Sixth Amendment requires jury unanimity in federal trials but that the right does not apply in state court. With five votes to affirm the Oregon defendant’s conviction in that case, the court held that the Sixth Amendment does not require unanimity in state prosecutions.
Now, Ramos seeks to overturn that decision. He argues that the history and purpose of the Sixth Amendment indicate that it requires unanimity to convict: Not only did the Constitution codify centuries of English law requiring unanimity, but a unanimity requirement is necessary to foster adequate jury deliberation and to ensure jury verdicts that check prosecutorial bias and represent the entire community. The state of Louisiana, by contrast, is focusing on the absence of “unanimity” from the text of the Sixth Amendment in its case, arguing that unanimity is not necessary to achieve the core purpose of the jury right: to provide a verdict based on the commonsense judgment of community members.
A group of law professors and social scientists has filed a brief in support of Ramos, citing research demonstrating several benefits of a unanimity requirement. First, several studies have found that under a unanimity requirement, juries engage in lengthier and perhaps more thorough deliberations (Hastie, Penrod & Pennington, 1983; Davis, 1975; see Devine et al., 2001). Second, unanimous juries may achieve more accurate results: In one mock-jury study, juries operating under a nonunanimous decision rule were more likely to convict the defendant of firstdegree murder, even though the facts didn’t support a conviction for that serious crime (Hastie, Penrod & Pennington, 1983). Third, nonunanimous juries may suppress the views of jurors of color. A recent study of 199 nonunanimous verdicts in Louisiana found that black jurors were about 250% as likely as white jurors to cast a not-guilty vote that was overridden by other jurors voting to convict (Frampton, 2018). Finally, participating jurors and the public have reported feeling more confident in the results of unanimous verdicts (Saks, 1997; MacCoun & Tyler, 1988).
The court will decide Ramos’s case by the end of June.
