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Supreme Court of the United States • 2020

Ramos v. Louisiana

590 U.S. 83

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Takeaway

In short, Ramos held that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous jury convictions in state and federal courts and overruled Apodaca’s contrary rule for state trials.

Background

Evangelisto Ramos was tried in Louisiana for a serious criminal offense. He maintained his innocence, and two of the twelve jurors voted to acquit him. Under Louisiana law then in effect, however, a 10-to-2 vote was sufficient to convict. Ramos received a life sentence without parole.

The Louisiana Court of Appeal affirmed Ramos’s conviction, relying on Apodaca v. Oregon, a fractured 1972 decision that had permitted nonunanimous state-court criminal verdicts. The Supreme Court granted review to decide whether the Sixth Amendment, incorporated against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment, requires unanimous jury verdicts for serious criminal convictions.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether the Sixth Amendment right to trial by an impartial jury requires a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense.

Holding

Yes. The Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous jury verdict for conviction of a serious criminal offense.

Reasoning

The Court read the Sixth Amendment’s reference to a “trial, by an impartial jury” as incorporating the established substance of the common-law jury trial, not merely requiring a body called a jury. At the founding, unanimity was an essential and long-settled feature of a criminal jury trial.

English common law had required unanimity for centuries, and early American practice followed the same rule. Founding-era state constitutions, state-court decisions, and influential nineteenth-century legal treatises all treated unanimity as indispensable to a criminal conviction.

The Court’s own precedents had repeatedly described unanimity as part of the Sixth Amendment jury-trial right. Louisiana’s argument that these statements were dicta did not justify abandoning both that longstanding judicial understanding and the historical meaning of the jury-trial guarantee.

Louisiana’s drafting-history argument was inconclusive. Although the Senate removed an express reference to unanimity from an earlier proposed version of the Amendment, that deletion could mean the requirement was understood to be implicit in the phrase “trial by an impartial jury.” Reading the deletion to eliminate unanimity would also threaten to strip the jury-trial guarantee of its historically established content.

The Court rejected Apodaca’s functionalist method of balancing the perceived costs and benefits of unanimity. Constitutional protections fixed by the people’s adoption of the Sixth Amendment are not invitations for later judges to retain only the features they deem sufficiently useful.

Issue #2

Whether the Sixth Amendment unanimity requirement applies to state criminal trials.

Holding

Yes. Because the Sixth Amendment jury-trial right is incorporated against the States, it has the same unanimity requirement in state and federal criminal trials.

Reasoning

The Court had already held that the Sixth Amendment jury-trial right is fundamental and applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment. Under the Court’s incorporation doctrine, an incorporated Bill of Rights guarantee has the same substantive content against state governments as it has against the federal government.

Justice Powell’s controlling vote in Apodaca rested on a contrary “dual-track” incorporation theory: that the Sixth Amendment required unanimity in federal court but not in state court. The Court explained that this approach had already been rejected and is incompatible with the rule that incorporated rights apply equally to federal and state governments.

Issue #3

Whether Apodaca v. Oregon required the Court to uphold Louisiana’s nonunanimous-verdict rule under stare decisis.

Holding

No. Six Justices agreed that Apodaca should be overruled, although they differed over whether its fractured reasoning had itself produced a controlling precedent.

Reasoning

Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justices Ginsburg and Breyer on this point, concluded that Apodaca lacked controlling precedential force. In their view, Justice Powell’s solo rationale could not bind later Courts because it depended on a dual-track incorporation theory that the Court had rejected before and after Apodaca.

Even treating Apodaca’s result as precedent, the Court concluded that stare decisis did not justify preserving it. Apodaca was seriously mistaken, conflicted with the historical understanding of the Sixth Amendment and the Court’s incorporation doctrine, and had become an isolated outlier in the Court’s case law.

The States’ reliance interests did not outweigh the constitutional error. Louisiana and Oregon might have to retry or resolve some cases still on direct review, but criminal-procedure decisions often require such adjustments, and only two States had used nonunanimous verdicts.

The Court declined to decide whether its rule would apply retroactively on collateral review. It explained that Teague v. Lane generally bars the retroactive application of new procedural rules on federal habeas review, and that any retroactivity question should be decided in a case where it was directly presented and fully briefed.

The Court also noted that Louisiana’s and Oregon’s nonunanimous-verdict provisions arose from efforts to diminish the influence of Black, racial, ethnic, and religious minority jurors. Although the constitutional holding rested on the Sixth Amendment’s meaning rather than an equal-protection claim, that history reinforced the Court’s refusal to preserve Apodaca through a policy-based assessment of the rule.

Concurrences

Justice Sotomayor

Reasoning

Justice Sotomayor joined all of Justice Gorsuch’s opinion except the conclusion that Apodaca lacked precedential force. She regarded Apodaca as precedent but concluded that it was uniquely unsound because it conflicted with both the Court’s Sixth Amendment unanimity cases and its incorporation cases.

She stressed that stare decisis has less force in criminal-procedure cases involving fundamental constitutional protections. The State’s interest in avoiding a limited number of retrials was not comparable to the settled property, contract, and regulatory interests that normally weigh most heavily in favor of preserving precedent.

She also emphasized the discriminatory origins of Louisiana’s and Oregon’s rules. In her view, the history mattered especially because the States had not genuinely confronted and cleansed the laws’ racial legacy when they later retained them.

Justice Kavanaugh

Reasoning

Justice Kavanaugh agreed that Apodaca should be overruled and joined the portions of the Court’s opinion establishing the Sixth Amendment unanimity rule. He maintained, however, that Apodaca’s bottom-line result—that state criminal juries need not be unanimous—had precedential force despite the absence of a majority rationale.

He proposed a structured stare decisis inquiry for constitutional cases. A court should ask whether the prior decision was egregiously wrong, whether it produced serious legal or real-world consequences, and whether overruling it would unduly upset reliance interests.

Applying that framework, he found Apodaca egregiously wrong because both original meaning and precedent establish a unanimity requirement that applies equally to States. He also concluded that the rule’s Jim Crow origins and its continuing capacity to silence minority jurors created serious harms to the justice system’s fairness and legitimacy.

Justice Kavanaugh believed reliance interests were manageable. Louisiana had already adopted prospective unanimity, Oregon could transition to the rule used by every other State, and the decision should generally not apply retroactively on federal habeas review under Teague because it announced a procedural, non-watershed rule.

Justice Thomas

Reasoning

Justice Thomas concurred only in the judgment. He would not undertake a fresh, comprehensive originalist analysis of the Sixth Amendment because the Court’s longstanding interpretation requiring unanimous felony guilty verdicts was, at minimum, a permissible reading of the constitutional text and history.

He agreed that historical sources strongly support unanimity as part of a criminal jury trial. But his principal disagreement concerned incorporation: he would apply the Sixth Amendment against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, rather than through substantive due process.

Justice Thomas rejected due-process incorporation as textually unsound. In his view, the Privileges or Immunities Clause was originally understood to protect citizens’ enumerated constitutional rights from state abridgment, and it therefore provides the proper basis for invalidating Ramos’s conviction.

Dissents

Justice Alito

Reasoning

Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and, except for one part, Justice Kagan, would have affirmed. He argued that Apodaca was plainly a binding precedent because a majority of the Justices in that case agreed on the result: a state conviction by a 10-to-2 or 11-to-1 verdict did not violate the Constitution.

He rejected the plurality’s view that Apodaca was not precedential. In his view, the Court’s later decisions, its repeated denials of review in similar cases, lower-court practice, and the legal profession’s understanding all confirmed that Apodaca had governed for nearly five decades.

Justice Alito argued that the Court had not supplied a sufficient stare decisis justification for overruling Apodaca. He defended the Apodaca plurality’s focus on the purposes of the jury-trial right, noting that the Court must distinguish between common-law jury practices incorporated into the Sixth Amendment and practices, such as excluding women from juries, that modern constitutional doctrine rejects.

He considered the States’ reliance interests decisive. Louisiana and Oregon had conducted thousands of trials under Apodaca, and the decision could require retrials in many cases still on direct review and potentially produce extensive collateral litigation. Retrials, he maintained, impose costs and practical difficulties far greater than resentencing or ordinary prospective procedural adjustments.

He also criticized the majority’s emphasis on the racist origins of the Louisiana and Oregon rules. Even assuming reprehensible original motives, he reasoned that the constitutional question was whether unanimity is required in every state criminal trial, including one in a State that adopted a nonunanimous rule for neutral reasons. Legitimate policy arguments, he noted, support allowing nonunanimous verdicts to avoid mistrials caused by a single rogue juror.