On April 20, 2020, the Supreme Court held that the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous jury verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense in state courts.
In so holding, the Court not only paved the way for potentially hundreds of defendants convicted by divided juries, like petitioner Evangelisto Ramos, to obtain new trials but also effectively overturned its prior holding in Apodaca v. Oregon. Thus, the potential impact of Ramos v. Louisiana extends far beyond issues of criminal procedure, as the justices’ spirited debate over when and whether to overturn precedent took center stage and illustrated deep divisions within the Court.
In 2016, a Louisiana jury found Ramos guilty of second-degree murder by a vote of 10-2. At the time of Ramos’s trial, Louisiana and Oregon were the only two states that did not require unanimous jury verdicts for serious criminal offenses. Just a few years later, Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment that eliminated non-unanimous jury verdicts. However, this amendment was not retroactive, and Ramos ultimately challenged his conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment, which establishes the right to an “impartial jury,” requires a unanimous jury verdict, including in state courts.
In ruling in favor of Ramos, the court overturned the 1972 case, triggering a heated debate among some of the justices that might foreshadow future cases to come concerning issues that often closely divide them.
Siding with Ramos, the majority found that the Sixth Amendment’s unanimous jury requirement is incorporated against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, which was joined in full by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer and, in part, by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous verdicts in state court criminal proceedings, but he disagreed with the majority’s reasoning; in a separate concurrence, he argued that this right applies to the states through the Privileges and Immunities Clause.
At the outset of the majority opinion, Justice Gorsuch explained that the Constitution’s text and structure indicate that the Sixth Amendment term “trial by an impartial jury” includes the requirement that a jury must reach a unanimous verdict to convict, a fact he described as “unmistakable.” Justice Gorsuch also found it equally clear that the Sixth Amendment’s unanimous jury requirement “applies to state and federal criminal trials equally.”
“As the Court has said many times over many decades, the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous verdict to convict,” Jeffrey Fisher, a lawyer for Ramos told the justices. He said that the opinion, in Louisiana, would only impact about 36 cases that are on direct review.
Louisiana countered that the Sixth Amendment’s right to a jury trial does not require criminal convictions by a unanimous jury in state or federal courts. In court, a lawyer for Louisiana argued that if the Supreme Court were to rule in favor of Ramos the ruling could apply to some 32,000 people that are currently serving time for serious crimes because thousands of petitioners would come to the court demanding relief. Oregon filed a friend of the court brief arguing that if the court were to rule in favor of Ramos it would require the retrial of “hundreds if not thousands of cases.”
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