April 20 (UPI) -- The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that criminal trial juries must be unanimous to convict defendants, an interpretation of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial that has been adopted by all U.S. states except one.
In a split decision, justices overturned a 2016 Louisiana conviction of a Louisiana man found guilty by a 10-to-2 jury vote of killing a woman in New Orleans.
"The Sixth Amendment term 'trial by an impartial jury' carries with it some meaning about the content and requirements of a jury trial," wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch. "One such requirement is that a jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict."
Only the state of Oregon still accepts split-jury verdicts of 10-to-2 to convict in criminal cases. Louisiana recently changed its laws to accept only unanimous jury votes, after more than 100 years of accepting split-jury verdicts.
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Dissenting Justice Samuel Alito, one of four justices opposing the ruling, defended allowing states to make their own rules about jury unanimity.
"If the majority's approach is not just a way to dispose of this one case, the decision marks an important turn," Alito said in his dissent.
The Supreme Court ruling acknowledged that non-unanimous verdicts were holdovers from racist eras that diluted the influence of non-white members of juries, Gorsuch wrote.
Non-unanimous juries were adopted in 1898 in Louisiana, where founding documents said they existed to "establish the supremacy of the white race," Gorsuch's opinion said. In Oregon, jury rules adopted in the 1930s, "can be similarly traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan," Gorsuch wrote.
Evangelisto Ramos was convicted and sentenced to life without parole in Louisiana by a split jury of 10-to-2, under a system designed during the Jim Crow era. It was a case that would have resulted in a mistrial in other states, Ramos's lawyers argued.
"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 Ramos's lawyer, Ben Cohen, of Promise of Justice Initiative.
"People were deprived liberty without the full protection of the Constitution. Now, as a result of the spread of COVID-19, this deprivation of liberty can literally be the difference between life and death," Cohen added.
The ruling could result in a new trial for Ramos, and possibly other people imprisoned under split-jury verdicts in Louisiana.
"It has been a long road to get here," said Jamila Johnson, managing attorney of Promise of Justice Initiative. "We are focused on identifying those who could be impacted ... because the state has no mechanism to identify [them]. Now is the time to ensure no one is left behind."
