Oregon Supreme Court gives retroactive effect to Ramos Sixth Amendment jury unanimity rule (two months after Louisiana Supreme Court refused to do so)

An opinion from the Oregon Supreme Court on this last working day of 2022 provides a notable bookend to the echoes of the Supreme Court's 2020 Ramos holding that the Sixth Amendment requires that a jury reach a unanimous guilty verdict to convict a defendant of a crime.  This local article reports on the basics and its import: 

Hundreds of felony convictions became invalid Friday after the Oregon Supreme Court struck down all non-unanimous jury verdicts reached before the practice was banned two years ago.

The retroactive ruling applies to all split-jury convictions reached during the 86-year stretch when Oregon was one of only two states, alongside Louisiana, to allow such verdicts.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Pro Tempore Richard Baldwin described the authorization of 10-2 and 11-1 jury verdicts in 1934 as a “self-inflicted injury” that was intended to minimize the voice of nonwhite jurors.

“We must understand that the passage of our non-unanimous jury-verdict law has not only caused great harm to people of color,” Baldwin wrote. “That unchecked bigotry also undermined the fundamental Sixth Amendment rights of all Oregonians for nearly a century.”

Voters approved Oregon’s non-unanimous jury system after a jury handed down a light sentence in a 1933 gangland murder trial, spurring racist and xenophobic newspaper coverage that blamed the compromise verdict on immigrant jurors, The Oregonian/OregonLive previously reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed divided verdicts in its landmark Ramos v. Louisiana decision in April 2020, but the order only applied to open cases and convictions that were actively being appealed when the ruling came down.

The ruling left the door open for states to make their own laws applying it retroactively. The Oregon legislature did not take that action, but people convicted by split juries began pursuing a retroactive ruling at the Oregon Appeals Court last year.

The Oregon Department of Justice says the Ramos ruling vacated more than 470 convictions with active appeals, meaning that prosecutors were required to essentially reboot each case from the beginning and either pursue a new trial, cut a plea deal or dismiss the charges.

The new state Supreme Court ruling means county district attorneys will have to make a similar decision for cases where the defendant had already exhausted a final appeal.

There are approximately 300 people, mostly in state prison, with exhausted appeals who have filed new litigation because they were convicted by a non-unanimous jury before the Ramos decision, according to Aliza Kaplan, a Lewis & Clark law professor and leader of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic.

The full opinions from the Oregon Supreme Court in Watkins v. Ackley are available here.

Notably, Louisiana was the only other state with a history of non-unanimous criminal jury verdicts, and a couple of months ago its state Supreme Court decided against giving retroactive effect to Ramos (as this local press piece details).  The full opinion from the Louisiana Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Reddick are available here.