The 1957 film "12 Angry Men" is about one juror's conflicting vote keeping a jury from immediately convicting a defendant of murder. Over the course of the movie, the other 11 jurors come to share the holdout's doubts about witness testimonies and the available evidence. Jurors originally convinced the defendant was guilty of murder and deserved the death penalty eventually realize he's innocent instead. The jury casts a unanimous vote to set him free as the film hits the 96-minute mark.
If the movie had been set in Louisiana prior to 2018, it could have ended after five minutes with someone who was not guilty being sentenced to death.
While the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled the practice was unconstitutional in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020), Louisiana was one of only two states that allowed juries to enter a verdict without consensus from the jurors until voters banned the practice in 2018. These split jury rulings were also called "Jim Crow Jury" decisions, as they allowed up to two dissenting jury votes to be ignored. What would have been a hung jury and a mistrial in the rest of the country often became lengthy sentences for mostly minority defendants.
The SCOTUS decision in Ramos v. Louisiana was not applied retroactively. Oregon, the other former split jury state, addressed the injustices of its past by invalidating the nearly 500 convictions involving non-unanimous jury decisions in 2023. Louisiana chose to go in the opposite direction. This leaves over 1,000 people convicted by a split jury languishing in prison with no path to having their cases reevaluated. Why?
Gotta Get the Whole Dozen To Agree
In criminal cases that include a jury trial, a conviction can only be secured with unanimity in the verdict from the jurors. This is one of the reasons over 95% of criminal cases never make it to trial, instead settling with a plea agreement. It is one of the few points of leverage a criminal defendant has when securing a plea agreement.
In the Ramos decision, SCOTUS ruled that split jury verdicts showed a historical bias against minority defendants. These "Jim Crow Jury" outcomes typically promoted white supremacy by allowing one or two votes cast for minority defendants to be passed over by the rest of the jury.
While Oregon responded by reconsidering the decisions of those convicted by split juries, Louisiana's lawmakers had something else in mind.
Louisiana Aggressive in Defending Split Jury Convictions
Denying reevaluation of split jury verdicts that led to convictions and prison sentences proved to be a team effort in Louisiana. The people of Louisiana voted to ban the use of split jury verdicts in 2018, but the wording of the ballot initiative, written by the Republican-led legislature, only affected new cases and didn't offer an option to be applied retroactively.
In 2022, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against new trials for the nearly 1,500 prisoners still serving sentences from split jury convictions. It cited that retrials would put a "high administrative burden" on the state's trial system. The Court's lone Black justice dissented, noting that "institutional racism" had no place in Louisiana's justice system.
Several bills attempting to pass a law allowing retrials died in the legislature. In 2024, at Governor Jeff Landry's urging, the state lawmakers instead passed a bill to close off one of the few remaining paths for split jury convicts to have their cases reexamined. If the prisoner could present a reasonable argument that the decision in their trial was racially motivated, they could potentially strike a plea deal with a willing prosecutor to secure their release.
The new law put an end to that, strenuously limiting the power of the prosecutors in those instances. The Louisiana legislature continues to block attempts to address the plight of those convicted by Jim Crow Jury decisions, but the fight doesn't appear to be over yet.
Related Resources
- What Happens When a Jury Is Deadlocked? (FindLaw's Law and Daily Life)
- The Right to a Jury Trial (FindLaw's Criminal Rights)
- Jim Crow Laws (FindLaw's Voting Rights)
