La. bill requiring unanimous verdicts in felony cases advances
26th March 2018 · 0 Comments
A Louisiana Senate committee advanced a bill proposing a constitutional amendment that would require juries to reach unanimous verdicts in all felony cases.
SB243 strikes through a single word in the state constitution to require all members of a 12-person jury vote to convict a defendant in a felony case.
Louisiana and Oregon are the only states that allow non-unanimous verdicts in jury trials.
State Sen. J.P. Morrell, D-New Orleans, the bill’s author, said Louisiana’s status as an outlier puts it at risk of being on the wrong end of a ruling by the United States Supreme Court. If the high court were to declare the current law unconstitutional, it could apply that ruling retroactively, causing “chaos” in the Louisiana justice system, Morrell said.
The committee voted 5-1 to advance the proposal to the Senate floor. The Louisiana District Attorneys Association opposed the bill, and Sen. Mack “Bodi” White, R-Baton Rouge, cast the lone no vote.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1972 in Apodaca v. Oregon that non-unanimous jury verdicts are constitutional.
Ed Tarpley, a proponent of the bill and the former Grant Parish district attorney, framed the issue as a constitutional one.
“This is about liberty,” Tarpley said. “If you love the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, then you have to support the senator’s bill.”
Tarpley testified that the law allowing non-unanimous verdicts, which was ratified in the state in 1898, was a racially-motivated relic of the post-Reconstruction era and a departure from the centuries-old legal tradition requiring unanimity in jury trials.
The policy was last updated in the 1974 Constitutional Convention. State lawmakers adopted the current jury requirements requiring at least a 10-2 vote. That was a one-vote increase over the 1898 standard, Tarpley said.
“When you look at the system we have in Louisiana, it’s legal schizophrenia,” Tarpley said. “Because for a six-person jury, the verdict has to be unanimous. For a capital case, the verdict has to be unanimous. But in the middle, for any other felony, you can be convicted by a 10-out-of-12 vote.”
S. Christie Smith, of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, spoke in support of the proposal and highlighted data from a 1997 study conducted by the Public Law Research Institute.
“The data strongly suggests that when a jury is required to reach a unanimous verdict, the jury focuses less on getting to a verdict and more on the facts themselves, which obviously is the ultimate objective of a trial,” Smith said.
Citing the same study, he added that requiring unanimity only increased the average length of jury deliberations to about two hours, up from 73 minutes.
Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana Association of District Attorneys, opposed advancing the bill, citing the lack of recent data on the effect of requiring unanimity. He proposed deferring the bill to allow further study of the issue by the Louisiana State Law Institute.
He told FOX 8 News that requiring unanimity would increase the number of hung juries and increase state spending on retrials.
“In today’s society getting 10 out of 12, in any group, to agree on any topic is a phenomenal task,” Adams said. “In today’s Twitter, social media society, everybody is in their own little corner. The fact is, more so than ever before, people take their agendas into the courtroom, and I think you’re inviting jury nullification by requiring unanimous verdicts.”
Sen. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans and a co-author of the bill, took issue with Adams’ request.
“I don’t know that punting this to another study is necessarily the answer, given the length of time we have been dealing with this,” Carter said.
In his closing comments, Morrell asked: “How do you have ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ when two people have doubt?”
To take effect, the proposed amendment would have to pass both houses of the Louisiana Legislature by a two-thirds vote. It would then require a simple majority in a statewide referendum.
Sen. Morrell also authored a bill aimed to shield victims of sexual assault from retaliatory lawsuits.
The Louisiana Senate has decided that courts should postpone any slander lawsuits filed against people who allege they’ve been sexually assaulted.
Sen. J.P. Morrell says wealthy perpetrators of sexual misconduct often use defamation lawsuits to try to prevent rape victims from being able to move forward with assault claims.
His proposal would require the delay of a slander lawsuit until all investigations and proceedings involving the assault claim are resolved.
The Senate voted 29-8 on March 19 to send the bill to the House for debate.
Opponents say they support the intent of Morrell’s legislation, but add it goes too far in impeding due process rights. Sen. John Milkovich, a Keithville Democrat, worried about people falsely accused of assault.
This article originally published in the March 26, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
