In Ramos v. Louisiana, decided April 20, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous jury verdict to convict anyone of a serious crime, in state court as well as federal court. The decision struck down laws in Louisiana and Oregon that had allowed felony convictions on 10-to-2 votes, and it overruled a nearly fifty-year-old precedent that had permitted those split verdicts to stand. Every juror must now agree on guilt before the government can secure a felony conviction anywhere in the country.
The Case That Reached the Court
Evangelisto Ramos was charged with second-degree murder in Louisiana in 2014. At his 2016 trial, the jury voted 10-to-2 to convict, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Under Louisiana law at the time, that split verdict was enough. Ramos appealed, arguing that convicting him of murder without a unanimous jury violated his Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and issued its decision on April 20, 2020.
Louisiana voters had already moved in the same direction. In 2018, roughly 64 percent of them approved a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous jury verdicts for felony offenses committed on or after January 1, 2019.1Ballotpedia. Louisiana Amendment 2, Unanimous Jury Verdict for Felony Trials Amendment That amendment applied only prospectively, though, and left people convicted under the old rule without a remedy. Ramos’s appeal put the underlying constitutional question directly to the Court.
Why the Sixth Amendment Requires Unanimity
The majority opinion, written by Justice Gorsuch, grounded the decision in history. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to trial “by an impartial jury” without spelling out every feature that a jury trial has to include. To fill in the meaning, Gorsuch looked to how jury trials worked when the Bill of Rights was adopted. English common law had treated unanimity as an essential feature of the jury for centuries, and early American courts followed the same practice. One framer described the right as “the unanimous consent of twelve of [one’s] neighbors and equals.”2Supreme Court of the United States. Ramos v. Louisiana
If the people who ratified the Sixth Amendment understood a jury verdict to mean a unanimous one, the Court reasoned, allowing a conviction over a juror’s dissent falls short of what the amendment requires. A “serious” offense, for this purpose, means a crime carrying a potential sentence of more than six months in prison.
How the Rule Applies to the States
The Sixth Amendment originally restricted only the federal government. Over time, the Court has applied most of the Bill of Rights to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, a process known as incorporation, and it incorporated the right to a jury trial in Duncan v. Louisiana in 1968. The question in Ramos was whether the unanimity requirement traveled with it.
The majority said yes, and rejected the idea that a constitutional right could mean one thing in federal court and something weaker in state court. That “dual-track” theory of incorporation had been losing ground for decades, and the Court treated it as thoroughly discredited. Unanimity is part of the Sixth Amendment jury right in federal court, and it is equally part of that right in state court.2Supreme Court of the United States. Ramos v. Louisiana
Overruling Apodaca v. Oregon
Standing in the way was Apodaca v. Oregon, a 1972 case in which the Court had allowed non-unanimous jury verdicts to stand.3Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Apodaca v. Oregon Apodaca had been fractured from the start. Four justices concluded the Sixth Amendment did not require unanimity at all. Four others said it did. Justice Lewis Powell cast the deciding vote in a solo concurrence arguing that unanimity applied in federal court but not in state court, a theory no other justice endorsed then or since.
The Ramos majority ran through the traditional stare decisis factors and found each one cut against keeping the old rule. No current justice defended Apodaca as correctly decided, and the opinion called it “gravely mistaken.” Its reasoning sat “uneasily with 120 years of preceding case law.” And neither Louisiana nor Oregon could identify the kind of reliance interests that normally justify preserving a precedent. The Court also questioned whether Apodaca had ever been binding precedent at all, since no single legal theory commanded a majority in 1972.2Supreme Court of the United States. Ramos v. Louisiana
Justice Alito’s dissent, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and (in most respects) Justice Kagan, did not defend non-unanimous verdicts on the merits. The dissenters argued that stare decisis should have kept Apodaca in place, warning that too-ready abandonment of settled precedent erodes public confidence in the stability of the law. The real disagreement was not whether unanimity is the better rule, but whether being wrong for fifty years is reason enough to change course.
The Racial History Behind the Split-Verdict Rules
Louisiana and Oregon were the only two states that still allowed non-unanimous felony convictions when Ramos was decided, and both rules had roots in racial and ethnic prejudice. That history figured prominently in the majority opinion.
Louisiana adopted its non-unanimous jury rule at a constitutional convention in 1898. One committee chairman declared that the convention’s purpose was to “establish the supremacy of the white race.” The resulting constitution included poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses designed to disenfranchise Black citizens. Delegates crafted the facially race-neutral 10-to-2 verdict rule to serve a parallel goal: ensuring that the votes of Black jurors could be overridden.2Supreme Court of the United States. Ramos v. Louisiana
Oregon’s version came in 1934, prompted by public anger over a murder trial that ended in a manslaughter conviction on an 11-to-1 vote. Local newspapers blamed the result on “corrupt jurors and untrained immigrants,” and a prominent editorial in the Oregonian tied the problem to “vast immigration into America from southern and eastern Europe, of people untrained in the jury system.” Justice Gorsuch wrote that Oregon’s rule “can similarly be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries.”4The Oregon Encyclopedia. Non-Unanimous Jury Law in Oregon
Who Benefits From the Ruling
Ramos changed the rule for every felony trial going forward: a conviction requires all twelve jurors to agree. A single holdout means a hung jury or an acquittal, not a conviction with an asterisk.
For people already convicted by split verdicts, the picture is much narrower. Defendants in Louisiana and Oregon whose non-unanimous convictions were still on direct appeal when Ramos was decided could challenge those convictions. But a year later, in Edwards v. Vannoy, the Court held 6–3 that the Ramos rule does not apply retroactively on federal collateral review. Anyone whose conviction had already become final before April 20, 2020, cannot use Ramos to seek relief in federal habeas proceedings.5Supreme Court of the United States. Edwards v. Vannoy
Thedrick Edwards, the petitioner in that case, was convicted by a 10-to-2 jury and sentenced to life. Unlike Ramos, whose case was still on direct appeal when the Court announced the new rule, Edwards had exhausted his direct appeals years earlier. The Court acknowledged the harshness of the outcome but held that new rules of criminal procedure generally do not apply retroactively. Edwards will serve the rest of his life in prison based on a verdict the Constitution now forbids. Some defendants in his position may have state-level post-conviction options, though those paths tend to be narrow and carry strict filing deadlines.
What Changes and What Doesn’t
For future criminal cases, the rule is uniform across the country: every felony conviction requires a unanimous jury. The decision also foreclosed any move by other states to experiment with non-unanimous rules, which the Court noted could have happened if Apodaca had been left in place.
The ruling does not reach civil trials. The Seventh Amendment’s civil jury trial right has not been incorporated against the states, so states remain free to set their own rules for civil jury verdicts.6Legal Information Institute. Seventh Amendment And, as Edwards made clear, the decision did not reopen the prison doors for people whose split-verdict convictions were already final. Ramos closed a long-standing loophole in the right to a fair trial, but for many defendants convicted under the old system, it arrived too late.