Trial News

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Sixth Amendment, as incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment, requires unanimous jury verdicts to convict people of serious criminal offenses. Although 48 states already required unanimous jury convictions, the decision affects verdicts in Louisiana and Oregon, which previously allowed convictions based on 10 to 2 votes. (Ramos v. Louisiana, 2020 WL 1906545 (U.S. Apr. 20, 2020).)

Evangelisto Ramos was charged with second-degree murder by the state of Louisiana. Following his 2016 trial, two jurors voted to acquit. Nevertheless, Ramos was convicted under state law and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. After a Louisiana appellate court affirmed his conviction and the Louisiana Supreme Court denied review, Ramos petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari to determine whether allowing split jury convictions in state court for serious criminal offenses violates the Sixth Amendment. After postponing a decision on Ramos’s petition six times, the Court granted certiorari in 2019.

Writing for the Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch quoted the Sixth Amendment, which among other guarantees, states that in criminal prosecutions, the accused is entitled to trial “by an impartial jury.” Justice Gorsuch examined the meaning of this phrase at the time the amendment was adopted, writing that—whether looking at “common law, state practices in the founding era, or opinions and treatise written soon afterward”—it was clear that the phrase was understood to require unanimous verdicts.

The opinion then turned to Apodaca v. Oregon (406 U.S. 404 (1972)), a plurality decision in which four justices would have ruled that unanimous jury verdicts are required in both federal and state courts, four justices would have ruled that no defendant is guaranteed a unanimous jury conviction, and the deciding vote—Justice Lewis Powell—wrote that the Sixth Amendment only guarantees defendants in federal court the right to a unanimous jury verdict. The Ramos Court criticized Apodaca as a “breezy cost-benefit analysis” that failed to account for the “racially discriminatory reasons that Louisiana and Oregon adopted their peculiar rules in the first place.” Finding that permitting state court split verdicts was “gravely mistaken”—and noting that stare decisis is not an “inexorable command”—the Court overruled Apodaca and reversed the Louisiana appellate court.  

Although Justice Gorsuch wrote for the majority in a 6-3 judgment (with respect to Parts I, II-A, III, and IV-B-1 of the opinion), only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined the opinion in full—including Part IV-A, which argued that Apodaca lacked precedential force.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined all but Part IV-A and filed a concurrence to “underscore” three points, including that overruling Apodaca as precedent was “not only warranted, but compelled.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the introduction and Parts I, II-A, III, and IV-B-1 and filed a concurrence to share his views of how stare decisis should be applied. He described three considerations he believes should dictate whether a decision should be overruled: whether the prior decision is “grievously wrong,” whether it has caused “significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences,” and whether overruling it would “unduly upset reliance interests.” Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in the judgment and filed a concurrence noting his disagreement with the incorporation of the Bill of Rights through the due process clause; he argued that the right to unanimous verdicts should apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause instead.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the dissent, which Chief Justice John Roberts joined in full and Justice Elena Kagan joined except for Part III-D (which held up the Court’s Citizens United (558 U.S. 310 (2010)) and Janus (138 S. Ct. 2448 (2018)) decisions as models for properly overturning precedent). The dissent argued that Apodaca clearly set precedent—one on which Louisiana and Oregon have placed “enormous reliance interests”—in terms of the hundreds or thousands of convictions that might have to be vacated and retried. Justice Alito concluded that “[u]nder the approach to stare decisis that we have taken in recent years, Apodaca should not be overruled.”

“The Court’s examination of the origins of nonunanimous jury laws illuminates a terrifying fact about our country: Binding legal precedent exists today that was designed to discriminate against human beings based on their race,” said Rapids City, S.D., criminal defense and personal injury attorney Robert Rohl. “Ramos highlights one particular law that originated to dilute ‘the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.’ What other laws, rooted in discrimination, continue to pervert our criminal justice system? This decision should challenge all of us to ask this question. As the Court writes, ‘stare decisis isn’t supposed to be the art of methodically ignoring what everyone knows to be true.’’’

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