Ghosts of the Confederacy plagues Louisiana’s Judiciary
23rd May 2022 · 0 Comments
“The racially biased origins of the Louisiana and Oregon laws uniquely matter here. Today, Louisiana’s and Oregon’s laws are fully—and rightly—relegated to the dustbin of history.”
– Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s
opinion in Ramos v. Louisiana,
April 20, 2020
Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor called out the racist intent of Louisiana and Oregon’s non-unanimous jury practices when the U.S. Supreme Court deemed such juries unconstitutional two years ago. In its ruling, the high Court wrote that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires a unanimous jury decision for criminal convictions.
Seats in the Louisiana Supreme Court (LSC) last week filled rapidly as community activists and civil rights attorneys gathered to hear testimony for and against making the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on non-unanimous juries retroactive in the case of Reddick v. Louisiana.
The Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), which represents Reginald Reddick and others convicted by non-unanimous juries, works to create positive change for people in the criminal legal system. PJI focuses on ending the death penalty, challenging inhumane conditions of confinement, exposing prosecutorial and judicial misconduct, providing pro bono representation for criminal defendants, and fighting racism in the criminal legal system.
Reddick, convicted in 1993 of the murder of Al Moliere of Plaquemine Parish, and an estimated 1,500 other people convicted of felonies by non-unanimous juries are seeking new trials.
And therein lay the rub. To assume that if a person’s constitutional rights were violated, in this case by the state of Louisiana, remedies would be automatically available. But…no.
In May 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against making the post-conviction remedy in the Ramos case for people convicted by non-unanimous juries retroactive on federal collateral review. Then in a nod to states’ rights, the Court left it to the states to decide whether or not to grant post-conviction relief to people convicted by non-unanimous juries.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, Republican who reportedly has interest in running for governor, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court against making the decision retroactive for the estimated 1,500 convicted by non-unanimous juries.
State attorneys argued before the GOP-stacked U.S. Supreme Court that making the remedy retroactive would overwhelm the state’s judiciary and retrying 1,500 cases would be cost-prohibitive. Landry got his wish.
In 2018, Louisiana voters banned non-unanimous juries from the state’s constitution. But if your constitutional rights were violated by a non-unanimous jury before 2019 when the ban took effect, you’re not entitled to restorative justice?
Now we understand why formerly enslaved people never got reparations. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, Blacks were three-fifths human, according to U.S. law. After the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments afforded them full citizenship and constitutional rights, Blacks were still denied restorative justice for 400 years of free labor in America.
After the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education that the Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal doctrine” was a discriminatory ruling, once again, Blacks were not compensated for 58 years of legal apartheid.
And here we are again. Fighting for true justice.
No one wants to see violent criminals freed. Our hearts go out to the victims, families, and businesses that bear the physical and psychological scars or loss of life caused by perpetrators. Criminals deserve to be in jail but not by violating constitutional rights.
Under the leadership of former confederate soldiers and officers, the Louisiana Legislature created racially discriminatory laws to keep Blacks from voting, sitting in judgment of their peers, and drawing life sentences, in many cases, by non-unanimous juries.
Now, 120 years later, the state has to pay the cost of its criminal acts. At the very least, those convicted by non-unanimous juries should get new trials.
Fourteen innocent people exonerated in Louisiana were convicted by non-unanimous jury verdicts. Of those, nine were exonerated by the IPNO (Innocence Project New Orleans). Eleven of the 14 are Black and were young men or teenagers when arrested. They spent a combined 224 years in Louisiana’s prisons for crimes they did not commit,” according to a 2019 amicus brief filed by the IPNO in the Ramos case.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s opinions in recent cases regarding partisan gerrymandering, non-unanimous juries, and women’s body autonomy (the right to have an abortion) bears intense scrutiny and investigation now. Clearly, the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is ceding its supremacy powers to the states.
For example, the Court’s refusal to block Texas’ abortion ban is a glaring example of right-wing partisanship on the Court.
There is no mystery as to why the Court neglected to make their non-unanimous juries opinion retroactive. The Court is appeasing Louisiana’s Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry.
The U.S. Supreme Court is on a dangerous, slippery slope. Its decisions to ignore the will of the majority of people (Roe v. Wade) and allowing a minority of Republicans to decide the fate of millions of Americans is reminiscent of the government’s abandonment of freed enslaved people shortly after the American Civil War.
When President Andrew Johnson pulled the Union troops out of the south, he helped former confederates to regain power over southern legislatures by passing Jim Crow laws, lynching, terrorizing, and threatening Blacks who tried to vote.
On April 10, 1880, the Louisiana Senate modified the Constitution to permit non-unanimous juries. “If it appears that nine or more of the jurors have agreed to the verdict, the same shall be recorded,” Thomas Aiello wrote in “Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Criminal Jury Verdicts in Louisiana,” in 2015.
In its request for a new trial for Reddick, The Promise Justice Initiative quoted Thomas Frampton, who wrote about the origins of the non-unanimous jury law in The Jim Crow Jury:
That the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against non-unanimous juries in 1898 and gave freedmen the right to vote in 1870 meant nothing to former confederates in the 19th Century Louisiana Legislature.
In the 1898 Louisiana Constitutional Convention, Judge Thomas Semmes, Chair of the Convention’s Judiciary Committee, affirmed: “We [are] here to establish the supremacy of the white race…”
“Semmes was a leading legal figure in Louisiana and the President of the American Bar Association in 1886. During the Civil War, he helped draft Louisiana’s articles of secession and served as a Louisiana senator in the Senate of the Confederate States of America,” Frampton wrote.
Semmes’ portrait, which hangs in the halls of the Louisiana Supreme Court, should also be relegated to the dustbin of history.
Ex-confederates codified non-unanimous juries at the conference. “Cases in which the punishment is necessarily at hard labor [shall be tried] by a jury of twelve, nine of whom concurring may render a verdict.” The majority number was later raised to ten during the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1973.”
Thankfully, 48 years later, on November 20, 2021, the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal became the first Louisiana appellate court to find that men and women unconstitutionally convicted by non-unanimous jury verdicts should be entitled to a remedy. The Court’s ruling is emblematic of the importance of a diverse judiciary system.
To their credit, District Attorney Jason Williams and state legislators are trying to provide post-conviction remedies to those sent to prison by non-unanimous juries. Last year, Williams began reviewing Orleans Parish’s non-unanimous jury cases and Randal Gaines’ (D-LaPlace) HB 1077 codifies retroactivity for inmates. They are among the state’s Black leadership.
Nonetheless, AG Landry is still fighting to keep the U.S. Supreme Court ruling from being retroactive. His excuses are pathetic. There can be no excuses for injustice.
“Beyond the incredible financial burden that flooding the criminal system with retrials would impose, important practical problems would impede the State’s efforts to obtain justice for victims,” state attorneys wrote, according to The Lens. “Reddick murdered Moliere nearly thirty years ago. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to reassemble the witnesses and evidence to retry him all these decades later.”
It remains to be seen if the LSC, composed of six white justices and one Black, will grant post-conviction relief to 1,500 prisoners via new trials, pardons, or the overturning of non-unanimous felony convictions. If the LSC grants post-conviction relief, that would be a watershed moment of true justice.
The question remains: Do we have justice for all or justice for some?
This article originally published in the May 23, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
