LDF urges US Supreme Court to require unanimous jury verdicts in all 50 states News
Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
LDF urges US Supreme Court to require unanimous jury verdicts in all 50 states

The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF) filed an amicus brief on Tuesday with the US Supreme Court urging it to find that the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of a unanimous jury verdict applies to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The LDF submitted the brief in support of the petitioner in the upcoming Supreme Court case Evangelisto Ramos v. Louisiana. In 2016, Ramos was convicted of second-degree murder by 10 out of 12 jurors in the state of Louisiana, which had a non-unanimous jury law at the time. The LDF’s brief argues that, reacting against the 1875 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment’s extension of  jury service to black men, the delegates of Louisiana’s 1898 constitutional convention “passed the non-unanimous jury provision to nullify the votes of Black jurors and allow white jurors to more easily convict Black defendants.” Down to last year, when the provision was removed from the state constitution, black jurors were more likely to have their dissenting votes diluted, and black defendants were more likely than white defendants to be convicted by non-unanimous juries.

The Supreme Court recently held in Timbs v. Indiana that the Eighth Amendment’s protection against excessive fines applied to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. According to the decision “[a] Bill of Rights protection is incorporated . . . if it is ‘fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty,’ or ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’”

In light of Timbs, the brief urges the court to revisit its 1972-decision in Apodaca v. Oregon, which held that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of unanimous jury verdicts did not extend to state criminal trials. The LDF argues that:

The government’s power to take away one’s liberty by way of criminal conviction is a power that remains in check by jury trials only when they follow “an ‘indestructible principle’ of American criminal law . . . that ‘guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. All twelve jurors must be convinced beyond that doubt.” In this way, the unanimous jury trial and the Fourteenth Amendment overlap in purpose: “to prevent oppression by Government.”

 

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