The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday, May 17 that its ban on non-unanimous juries will not be retroactive.
The ruling denies legal relief for about 1,500 Louisiana inmates who were found guilty by divided juries.
Justices of the nation’s highest court agreed 6-3 that when the Supreme Court ruled in 2020 the U.S. Constitution requires a jury’s decision to be unanimous to convict a defendant for a crime, it was not a ruling that goes back in time.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh gave the majority opinion saying the court’s “well-settled retroactivity doctrine” led him to the conclusion that the decision doesn’t apply retroactively. He was joined in agreement by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
“For the first time in many decades … those convicted under rules found not to produce fair and reliable verdicts will be left without recourse in federal courts, ” Justice Kagan wrote.
The Supreme Court’s decision affects prisoners who were convicted by split juries in Louisiana and Oregon as well as the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico. Those two states and U.S. territory were the only jurisdictions in the U.S. that had allowed criminal convictions based on divided jury votes.
The Supreme Court was prompted to make its decision based on the case Edwards v. Vannoy, 19-5807, involving Thedrick Edwards, a Louisiana prisoner convicted by a split jury for a crime spree in Baton Rouge in 2006.
Edwards, who had confessed to police, is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole after being convicted by a split jury of aggravated rape, two counts of aggravated kidnapping, and five counts of armed robbery. The jury divided 10-2 on most of the robbery charges and 11-1 on the remaining charges.
According to the Associated Press, Edwards, who is Black, has argued among other things that prosecutors intentionally kept Black jurors off the case; the lone Black juror on the case voted to acquit him.
“Those people who have already had their whole round of trials will not get new trials”, said Solicitor General Liz Murrill who represented Louisiana in the Ramos v. Louisiana case.
She believes the supreme court’s ruling was the right decision and had they felt differently, Louisiana would have had a mess on their hands.
“It would be a serious imposition on our court system and the court should not be applying new rules it finds to exist and apply them retroactively because it has a serious, serious effect on our criminal justice system”, said Murrill.
She says a lot of the cases that would have been set for re-trail date back decades. And the state courts would have had problems when it came to witnesses that are no longer alive and evidence against the defendants that has been lost or destroyed.
