Ramos v. Louisiana
| Decision Date | 20 April 2020 |
| Docket Number | No. 18-5924,18-5924 |
| Citation | 206 L.Ed.2d 583,140 S.Ct. 1390 |
| Parties | Evangelisto RAMOS, Petitioner v. LOUISIANA |
| Court | U.S. Supreme Court |
Jeffrey L. Fisher, Stanford, CA, for the petitioner
Elizabeth Murrill, Solicitor General, for the respondent.
Jeff Landry, Attorney General, Elizabeth B. Murrill, Solicitor Genera, Michelle Ghetti, Deputy Solicitor General, Colin Clark, Assistant Attorney General, Louisiana Department of Justice, Baton Rouge, LA, Leon A. Cannizzaro. Jr., District Attorney, Parish of Orleans, Donna Andrieu, Chief of Appeals, New Orleans, LA, William S. Consovoy, Jeffrey M. Harris, Consovoy McCarthy PLLC, Arlington, VA 22209, for respondent.
Jeffrey L. Fisher, Brian H. Fletcher, Pamela S. Karlan, Stanford Law School, Supreme Court, Litigation Clinic, Stanford, CA, Yaira Dubin, O'Melveny & Myers, LLP, New York, NY, G. Ben Cohen, Shanita Farris, Erica Navalance, The Promise of Justice, Initiative, New Orleans, LA, for petitioner.
Justice GORSUCH announced the judgment of the Court and delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Parts I, II–A, III, and IV–B–1, an opinion with respect to Parts II–B, IV–B–2, and V, in which Justice GINSBURG, Justice BREYER, and Justice SOTOMAYOR join, and an opinion with respect to Part IV–A, in which Justice GINSBURG and Justice BREYER join.
Accused of a serious crime, Evangelisto Ramos insisted on his innocence and invoked his right to a jury trial. Eventually, 10 jurors found the evidence against him persuasive. But a pair of jurors believed that the State of Louisiana had failed to prove Mr. Ramos's guilt beyond reasonable doubt; they voted to acquit.
In 48 States and federal court, a single juror's vote to acquit is enough to prevent a conviction. But not in Louisiana. Along with Oregon, Louisiana has long punished people based on 10-to-2 verdicts like the one here. So instead of the mistrial he would have received almost anywhere else, Mr. Ramos was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Why do Louisiana and Oregon allow nonunanimous convictions? Though it's hard to say why these laws persist, their origins are clear. Louisiana first endorsed nonunanimous verdicts for serious crimes at a constitutional convention in 1898. According to one committee chairman, the avowed purpose of that convention was to "establish the supremacy of the white race," and the resulting document included many of the trappings of the Jim Crow era: a poll tax, a combined literacy and property ownership test, and a grandfather clause that in practice exempted white residents from the most onerous of these requirements.1
Nor was it only the prospect of African-Americans voting that concerned the delegates. Just a week before the convention, the U. S. Senate passed a resolution calling for an investigation into whether Louisiana was systemically excluding African-Americans from juries.2 Seeking to avoid unwanted national attention, and aware that this Court would strike down any policy of overt discrimination against African-American jurors as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment,3 the delegates sought to undermine African-American participation on juries in another way. With a careful eye on racial demographics, the convention delegates sculpted a "facially race-neutral" rule permitting 10-to-2 verdicts in order "to ensure that African-American juror service would be meaningless."4
Adopted in the 1930s, Oregon's rule permitting nonunanimous verdicts can be similarly traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute "the influence of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities on Oregon juries."5 In fact, no one before us contests any of this; courts in both Louisiana and Oregon have frankly acknowledged that race was a motivating factor in the adoption of their States’ respective nonunanimity rules.6
We took this case to decide whether the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial—as incorporated against the States by way of the Fourteenth Amendment—requires a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense.7 Louisiana insists that this Court has never definitively passed on the question and urges us to find its practice consistent with the Sixth Amendment. By contrast, the dissent doesn't try to defend Louisiana's law on Sixth or Fourteenth Amendment grounds; tacitly, it seems to admit that the Constitution forbids States from using nonunanimous juries. Yet, unprompted by Louisiana, the dissent suggests our precedent requires us to rule for the State anyway. What explains all this? To answer the puzzle, it's necessary to say a bit more about the merits of the question presented, the relevant precedent, and, at last, the consequences that follow from saying what we know to be true.
I
The Sixth Amendment promises that "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law." The Amendment goes on to preserve other rights for criminal defendants but says nothing else about what a "trial by an impartial jury" entails.
Still, the promise of a jury trial surely meant something —otherwise, there would have been no reason to write it down. Nor would it have made any sense to spell out the places from which jurors should be drawn if their powers as jurors could be freely abridged by statute. Imagine a constitution that allowed a "jury trial" to mean nothing but a single person rubberstamping convictions without hearing any evidence—but simultaneously insisting that the lone juror come from a specific judicial district "previously ascertained by law." And if that's not enough, imagine a constitution that included the same hollow guarantee twice —not only in the Sixth Amendment, but also in Article III.8 No: The text and structure of the Constitution clearly suggest that the term "trial by an impartial jury" carried with it some meaning about the content and requirements of a jury trial.
One of these requirements was unanimity. Wherever we might look to determine what the term "trial by an impartial jury trial" meant at the time of the Sixth Amendment's adoption—whether it's the common law, state practices in the founding era, or opinions and treatises written soon afterward—the answer is unmistakable. A jury must reach a unanimous verdict in order to convict.
The requirement of juror unanimity emerged in 14th century England and was soon accepted as a vital right protected by the common law.9 As Blackstone explained, no person could be found guilty of a serious crime unless "the truth of every accusation ... should ... be confirmed by the unanimous suffrage of twelve of his equals and neighbors, indifferently chosen, and superior to all suspicion."10 A " ‘verdict, taken from eleven, was no verdict’ " at all.11
This same rule applied in the young American States. Six State Constitutions explicitly required unanimity.12 Another four preserved the right to a jury trial in more general terms.13 But the variations did not matter much; consistent with the common law, state courts appeared to regard unanimity as an essential feature of the jury trial.14
It was against this backdrop that James Madison drafted and the States ratified the Sixth Amendment in 1791. By that time, unanimous verdicts had been required for about 400 years.15 If the term "trial by an impartial jury" carried any meaning at all, it surely included a requirement as long and widely accepted as unanimity.
Influential, postadoption treatises confirm this understanding. For example, in 1824, Nathan Dane reported as fact that the U. S. Constitution required unanimity in criminal jury trials for serious offenses.16 A few years later, Justice Story explained in his Commentaries on the Constitution that "in common cases, the law not only presumes every man innocent, until he is proved guilty; but unanimity in the verdict of the jury is indispensable."17 Similar statements can be found in American legal treatises throughout the 19th century.18
Nor is this a case where the original public meaning was lost to time and only recently recovered. This Court has, repeatedly and over many years, recognized that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimity. As early as 1898, the Court said that a defendant enjoys a "constitutional right to demand that his liberty should not be taken from him except by the joint action of the court and the unanimous verdict of a jury of twelve persons."19 A few decades later, the Court elaborated that the Sixth Amendment affords a right to "a trial by jury as understood and applied at common law, ... includ[ing] all the essential elements as they were recognized in this country and England when the Constitution was adopted."20 And, the Court observed, this includes a requirement "that the verdict should be unanimous."21 In all, this Court has commented on the Sixth Amendment's unanimity requirement no fewer than 13 times over more than 120 years.22
There can be no question either that the Sixth Amendment's unanimity requirement applies to state and federal criminal trials equally. This Court has long explained that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial is "fundamental to the American scheme of justice" and incorporated against the States under the Fourteenth Amendment.23 This Court has long explained, too, that incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights bear the same content when asserted against States as they do when asserted against the federal government.24 So if the Sixth Amendment's right to a jury trial requires a unanimous verdict to support a conviction in federal court, it requires no less in state court.
II
A
How, despite these seemingly straightforward principles, have Louisiana's and Oregon's laws managed to hang on for so long? It turns out that the Sixth Amendment's otherwise simple story took a strange turn in 1972. That year, the Court...
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