Official Journal of the Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Louisiana 374 (H. Hearsey ed. Faced with this hard fact, Louisianas only remaining option is to invite us to distinguish between the historic features of common law jury trials that (we think) serve important enough functions to migrate silently into the by . And no one on this Court or on a lower court had any trouble locating the narrow common ground between Justice Powell and the plurality in Apodaca: The States need not require unanimity to comply with the Constitution. Juror unanimity emerged as a vital common law right in 14th-century England, appeared in the early American state constitutions, and provided the backdrop against which the In both cases, the rules had racist roots that went back into the 19th century. The longer-term questions pertain to the power of stare decisis to influence the Court on other decisions. Stat. 18-5924 (U.S. filed Sept. 6, 2019). 2326. 505 U.S. 1079 (1992) (per curiam)); Sawyer v. Smith, . IX, 6 (1790). Stat. That said, in constitutional as in statutory cases, to overrule an important precedent is serious business. Jackson, 30 A. LXXXII, Art. Baldwin v. New York, And what about the prior 400 years of English and American cases requiring unanimityshould we dismiss all those as dicta too? 476 U.S. 79 (1986); Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); Montejo v. Louisiana, Sixth Amendment jury-trial right since he had already done that just two years before in his opinion for the Court in Williams v. Florida, To state the point in simple terms: Why stick by an erroneous precedent that is egregiously wrong as a matter of constitutional law, that allows convictions of some who would not be convicted under the proper constitutional rule, and that tolerates and reinforces a practice that is thoroughly racist in its origins and has continuing racially discriminatory effects? VI, 10; Utah Const., Art. 391 U.S. 145, 154158 (1968), was handed down just four years before Apodaca, the Sixth Amendment permits non-unanimous verdicts in state criminal trials, and in all the years since then, no Justice has even hinted that Apodaca should be reconsidered. Const., Art. No doubt, too, those who risk being subjected to nonunanimous juries in Louisiana and Oregon today, and elsewhere tomorrow, would dispute the dissents suggestion that their 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, Oregons 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]. Id., at 809. The final question is whether Justice Powells reasoning in Apodacanamely, his view that the I agree with most of the Courts rationale, and so I join all but Part IVA of its opinion. Send them money for essential shopping in prison. 3.270 (2019); Ind. The reason is straightforward: As Justice OConnor once wrote for the Court, stare decisis is not as strict when we interpret the Constitution because our interpretation can be altered only by constitutional amendment or by overruling our prior decisions. Agostini, 521 U.S., at 235. v. Hyatt, 587 U.S. ___ (2019); Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees, 585 U.S. ___ (2018); Hurst v. Florida, 577 U.S. ___ (2016); Obergefell v. Hodges, A notable exception is the Grand Jury Clause of the Sixth Amendment right in perpetuity rather than ask two States to retry a slice of their prior criminal cases. Crim. Except for the effects on that limited class of direct- review cases, it will be relatively easy going forward for Louisiana and Oregon to transition to the unanimous jury rule that the other 48 States and the federal courts use. The Court has repeatedly reaffirmed the Ten jurors voted to convict Ramos, and two voted to acquit. I, 10 (providing that [e]ach of the several courts of common pleas may, with the approval of the Supreme Court, provide for the initiation of criminal proceedings therein by informationa condition that has now been met in all counties); see also 42 Pa. Cons. And while resentencing was possible in all the cases affected by Booker, there is no guarantee that all the cases affected by todays ruling can be retried. On this question, I do not write on a blank slate. So while the dissent worries that we defy a Marks precedent, it is oddly coy about where exactly that precedent might be found. In particular, both sides admit that Justice Powells opinion cannot bind usprecisely because he relied on a dual-track rule of incorporation that an unbroken line of majority opinions before and after Apodaca has rejected. In this case, petitioner Evangelisto Ramos was convicted of a serious crime in a Louisiana court by a 10-to-2 jury verdict. For this reason, the origins of the Louisiana and Oregon rules have no bearing on the broad constitutional question that the Court decides. (quoting Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 149 (1968)). XXII (1776); N.Y. To begin with, judges may disagree about whether a prior decision is wrong in the first placeand importantly, that disagreement is sometimes the real dispute when judges joust over stare decisis. But this Court has now roundly rejected it. [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. Lost in the accounting are the racially discriminatory reasons that Louisiana and Oregon adopted their peculiar rules in the first place. His point, rather, was that what the Court had already identified as the fundamental purpose of the jury-trial right was not undermined by allowing a verdict of 11 to 1 or 10 to 2. No subsequent This argument, made in passing, constitutes an attack on the rule that the Court adopted in Marks v. United States, See Teague v. Lane, 392 U.S. 631, 635 (1968) (per curiam) (rejecting retroactivity for Duncan, Fourth Amendment requires a warrant, but takes an idiosyncratic view of the consequences of violating that right. Other state courts held the same view. LXI (1777); Mass. Fourteenth Amendment applies to the States only a watered-down, subjective version of the individual guarantees of the Bill of Rights.[31] Its a point weve restated many times since, too, including as recently as last year. Teague recognizes only two exceptions to that general habeas non-retroactivity principle: if (1) the rule is substantive or (2) the rule is a watershed rul[e] of criminal procedure implicating the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the criminal proceeding. Whorton v. Bockting, R. Cross & J. Harris, Precedent in English Law 1 (4th ed. 453 U.S. 454 (1981), holding limited by Arizona v. Gant, See Ore. Rule App. 323 U.S. 214 (1944); Plessy v. Ferguson, To overrule, the Court demands a special justification or strong grounds. Const., Art. Sixth Amendment represents a deep commitment of the Nation to the right of jury trial in serious criminal cases as a defense against arbitrary law enforcement (internal quotation marks omitted)). P. R. 541 U.S. 36 (2004); Lawrence v. Texas, It is also important that the Court as a whole adhere to its precedent[s] about precedent., Three Justices join the principal opinion in its entirety. A four-Justice plurality, questioning whether unanimity serves an important function in contemporary society, concluded that unanimitys costs outweighed its benefits. When Apodaca was decided, it was already an outlier in the Courts jurisprudence, and over time it has become even more of an outlier. Sixth Amendment? Veteran Court watchers seem to be betting that inmates ought not to get their hopes up. [7] Racists all? I have already rejected our due process incorporation cases as demonstrably erroneous, and I fundamentally disagree with applying that theory of incorporation simply because it reaches the same result in the case before us. Suppose we face a question of first impression under the Accordingly, I concur only in the judgment. Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury includes a protection against nonunanimous felony guilty verdicts. 367 U.S. 643 (1961). The Court therefore must balance the importance of having constitutional questions decided against the importance of having them decided right. Citizens United, 558 U.S., at 378 (Roberts, C.J., concurring). In statutory cases, stare decisis is comparatively strict, as history shows and the Court has often stated. See Ariz. Rev. (slip op., at 12). 541 U.S. 36 (2004). In Part II of this opinion, I will address the surprising argument, advanced by three Justices in the majority, that Apodaca was never a precedent at all, and in Part III, I will explain why stare decisis supports retention of that precedent. But . It is binding in that sense. In other words, that access to a constitutional right the Court deemed fundamental would depend on where you lived. of the commonsense judgment of a group of laymen between the defendant and the possibility of an overzealous prosecutor.[41] And measured against that muddy yardstick, they quickly concluded that requiring 12 rather than 10 votes to convict offers no meaningful improvement. Even though there was no opinion of the Court, the decision satisfies even the narrowest understanding of a precedent as this Court has understood the concept: The decision prescribes a particular outcome when all the conditions in a clearly defined set are met. Blackstonethe preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation, Alden v. Maine, 515 U.S. 506, 511, n. 2 (1995) (Apodaca conclude[d] that jury unanimity is not constitutionally required); Schad v. Arizona, Oregon certainly did not make such a concession. Fourteenth Amendment. The objective was to allow a majority Anglo-Saxon jury to obtain convictions without getting agreement from any African-American colleagues. XI (1786); Va. But we ultimately decided the case on another ground and left the Marks rule intact. Those three considerations together provide a structured methodology and roadmap for determining whether to overrule an erroneous constitutional precedent. 100 U.S. 303, 308310 (1880); T. Aiello, Jim Crows Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana 16, 19 (2015). There is considerable evidence that the phrase trial . At trial, the prosecution produced the DNA evidence but no eyewitnesses or physical evidence linking Ramos directly to the murder. What about Justice Powells concurrence? You're all set! But one assumes from its silence that the Court is either following our due process incorporation precedents or believes that nothing in this case turns on which clause applies, Timbs, supra, at ___ (Gorsuch, J., concurring) (slip op., at 1). This interpretation of the States position is questionable,[13] but even if Louisiana made that concession, how could that settle the matter? 431 U.S., at 235236. I will therefore attempt to untangle these questions and address each in turn. That question, we are told, will be decided in a later case. 391 U.S. 145, 149 (1968); id., at 166 (Black, J., concurring); see also Malloy, 378 U.S., at 1011; see generally Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. ___ (2019); McDonald v. Chicago, 501 U.S. 808, 827 (1991)). But two States, Louisiana and Oregon, have long punished people based on 10-to-2 verdicts. Sixth Amendment, before facing criminal punishment. There can be no question either that the We have an admittedly mistaken decision, on a constitutional issue, an outlier on the day it was decided, one thats become lonelier with time. 576 U.S. 446, 456457 (2015); Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 505 U.S. 833 (1992);[1] Payne v. Tennessee, Const., Art. VII, 5(3)(5); Pa. 4102, 4103 (2018); Mich. Comp. 576 U.S. 446, 455456 (2015); Payne v. Tennessee,
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