The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Friday that all state criminal convictions which resulted from nonunanimous jury verdicts are invalid. The ruling comes after a 2020 US Supreme Court decision that held non-unanimous jury verdicts violate the US Constitution’s Sixth Amendment.

The petitioner was convicted of crimes in Oregon by nonunanimous juries before the US Supreme Court issued its decision in  Ramos v. Louisiana. Before 2020, Louisiana and Oregon were the only states that did not require unanimous jury verdicts for criminal convictions. After Ramos was handed down, the petitioner applied for post-conviction relief before an Oregon trial court and was rejected as the court did not believe Ramos applied retroactively. The petitioner later appealed the rejection of his post-conviction challenge to the Oregan Supreme Court.

Justice Thomas A. Balmer authored the Oregon court’s opinion. Balmer held that criminal convictions of a nonunanimous jury violate “our sense of what is fundamentally fair in a criminal proceeding.” The court concluded that this constitutional violation renders criminal convictions void.

Justice Richard C. Baldwin wrote a concurrence and stressed the importance of learning from history. The concurrence focused on Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law history. The concurrence stressed the “discriminatory purpose and effect” of Oregon’s nonunanimous verdict law and its disproportionate effect on defendants of color.

The court supported its conclusion with the Ramos decision and the Oregon Post-Conviction Hearing Act. The act provides that post-conviction relief shall be granted after a substantial denial in the proceedings of a petitioner’s Constitutional rights, and which denial rendered the conviction void. As a result of the ruling, Louisiana is now the only state that permits split jury verdicts in criminal cases.