Both Louisiana and Oregon, alone among the 50 states, permit non-unanimous jury verdicts in criminal cases, and each year, criminal defendants in those states are convicted by non-unanimous juries, even in felony cases that carry a potential sentence of life in prison. In November 2008, the state of Louisiana charged Ortiz T. Jackson with murder. Mr. Jackson, who has denied any involvement in the murder, filed a motion to require a unanimous jury verdict, which was denied by the trial court. Mr. Jackson was subsequently found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury vote of 10-2, and sentenced to life in prison at hard labor without the benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence. The appeals court affirmed Mr. Jackson’s conviction, and the state Supreme Court denied Mr. Jackson’s request for review.

CAC represented Mr. Jackson before the United States Supreme Court. On March 3, 2014, along with our co-counsel, Ben Cohen of The Promise of Justice Initiative, we filed a petition for a writ of certiorari in the Court on behalf of Mr. Jackson, urging the Court to hear his case. As our petition explained, state courts in both Louisiana and Oregon have refused to consider the constitutionality of their respective state’s non-unanimous jury rule based primarily on the Supreme Court’s badly fractured 4-1-4 decision in the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon, which held that individuals may be convicted by non-unanimous juries in state court. Our cert. petition in Jackson demonstrated that Apodaca is not only inconsistent with the history and purposes of the Sixth Amendment, but also with the Court’s more recent case law, and urged the Court to review Jackson in order to put an end to the unconstitutional practices in Louisiana and Oregon.

We argued, among other things, that convicting criminal defendants without the unanimous consent of a jury denies these individuals a right that the Framers viewed as fundamental. As our petition demonstrated, the Framers understood the unanimity of a jury to be as much a part of the jury right as the right to a jury of one’s neighbors and peers. To the Framers, the requirement of jury unanimity was critical to ensuring the full and fair jury deliberations that the Sixth Amendment requires. Indeed, more recent empirical research supports the Framers’ view that jury unanimity is essential to the jury as a bulwark of liberty. Specifically, evidence has shown that when unanimity is required, jurors evaluate evidence more thoroughly, spend more time deliberating, and are more likely to consider all viewpoints.

On April 28, 2014, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Jackson. By deciding not to hear such an important case, the Court refused to deal with a continuing affront to our system of criminal justice, inaction that will result in more defendants being denied the jury right envisioned by the Framers of our Bill of Rights.