Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

End the Injustice of Nonunanimous Juries
Calvin Duncan
09 Sep 2020
End the Injustice of Nonunanimous Juries
End the Injustice of Nonunanimous Juries

Non-unanimous verdicts allow ten jurors to “simply ignore the views of their fellow panel members of a different race or class.”

“People still languish in prison based on an unconstitutional rule.”

When I was lying on my bunk in Angola prison, the maximum-security facility in Louisiana, my dream of coming back to Oregon sustained me. I missed the parks, the hiking trails and the friendly people.

In 1982, I was 19 years old and learning the welding trade at the Job Corps program at Mt. Hood. I was planning to join the military. But someone called an anonymous tip line in New Orleans, my hometown, and said that a “negro male” with my name had committed a murder the previous year.

I spent 28 ½ years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit. When lawyers with the Innocence Project New Orleans uncovered exculpatory evidence that the prosecutors hid from my lawyers, the Louisiana Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court. The prosecutor then offered me a deal in exchange for my release. Now, I’m back in Oregon as a first-year law student at Lewis & Clark Law School.

While I was in prison, I was paid 20 cents an hour to help other men with their legal cases. Decades ago, I spotted a legal issue that put a lot of people behind bars unfairly. Louisiana allowed defendants to be sent to prison, sometimes for life, based on jury verdicts of 10-2 or 11-1. The only other state to recognize guilty verdicts by nonunanimous juries was Oregon. I knew plenty of guys who were innocent, but had been convicted by nonunanimous juries. In any other state or the federal system, they would not have been convicted because the government failed to meet its burden of proof.

“I knew plenty of guys who were innocent, but had been convicted by nonunanimous juries.”

In Louisiana, the split-jury rule was adopted by a Jim Crow era constitutional convention in order to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race,” according to official state records. In Oregon, as the U.S. Supreme Court recently observed, the “rule permitting non-unanimous verdicts can similarly be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial, ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries.” As Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, the rule had just that effect in both states: allowing 10 jurors to “simply ignore the views of their fellow panel members of a different race or class.”

As a “jailhouse lawyer,” I filed petition after petition challenging nonunanimous juries. I lost and lost. Even after I was released, I continued trying. Finally, on my 23rd attempt, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to address the issue, and on April 20, in Ramos v. Louisiana, the court struck down Oregon and Louisiana’s split-jury rule and said that from now on, jury verdicts must be unanimous.

The ruling was an incredible victory. But it’s incomplete. The Supreme Court ruling entitles people convicted by nonunanimous juries to a new trial untainted by racism if their case is on direct appeal – those cases in which convictions are under initial reviews by an appellate court. But when it comes to people whose cases are older, the law is murkier.

“Ramos v. Louisiana struck down Oregon and Louisiana’s split-jury rule.”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum appears to be taking the stance that those people are out of luck. Her office has already fought a Marion County man’s attempt to challenge his 2016 conviction by a nonunanimous jury, arguing that the Ramos decision should not apply retroactively to older cases like his. And there’s little to suggest her office will act any differently for the hundreds of other defendants in prison due to split jury verdicts who are filing their cases now.

Rosenblum’s decision means that people will languish in prison based on an unconstitutional rule that Justice Sonia Sotomayor called “racially biased” and Justice Kavanaugh called an “engine of discrimination.”

Rosenblum has the power to make this right. She can acknowledge the injustice of maintaining the nonunanimous jury verdict standard for older cases just as she has already acknowledged its injustice for cases still in the direct appeals process. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in striking down nonunanimous juries, it is wrong to “perpetuate something we all know to be wrong only because we fear the consequences of being right.” If Black lives – and the lives of other minorities – matter to the attorney general, she will do the right thing and give the benefit of Ramos v. Louisiana -- a new trial -- to all of those convicted by racially tainted nonunanimous juries, even those whose cases are beyond direct appeal.

Calvin Duncan is a first-year law student at Lewis & Clark Law School. He was on the legal team that brought Ramos v. Louisiana challenging the constitutionality of nonunanimous jury verdicts to the U.S. Supreme Court. He lives in Portland.

This article previously appeared in OregonLive.com.

COMMENTS?

Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport

Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]   

Mass Black Incarceration

Trending

Elizabeth Warren Wants Green Bombs, not a Green New Deal
Parallels Between Black and Palestinian Struggles
Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
Bill Cosby Should Have Been Denounced by Black America Long Ago
The Black Wall Around Barack Obama: Who Does It Protect Him Against?
How Complacency, Complicity of Black Misleadership Class Led to Supreme Court Evisceration of the Voting Rights Act

Related Stories

Lynchings By Law
Aaron Greene
Lynchings By Law
10 December 2020
The Trump administration plans to execute five people before there is a change of power.
Report: Incarceration Destabilizes Neighborhood Economies, Doesn’t Increase Safety
Hannah Gaskill 
Report: Incarceration Destabilizes Neighborhood Economies, Doesn’t Increase Safety
25 November 2020
Mass incarceration robs and destabilizes Black communities, and doesn’t make anyone safter.
We Can’t Be Free Until We Fully Abolish Slavery
Michele Bratcher Goodwin
We Can’t Be Free Until We Fully Abolish Slavery
14 October 2020
Through a loophole in the 13th Amendment, governments and corporations profit from cheap, incarcerated labor.
NYPD Promoted Cop Accused of Vicious Strip Searches of Over a Dozen Black and Latino Men
y Joaquin Sapien, Topher Sanders, Nate Schweber and Daniel Zender
NYPD Promoted Cop Accused of Vicious Strip Searches of Over a Dozen Black and Latino Men
16 September 2020
Of at least 77 allegations made against McCormack in 26 separate CCRB complaints, 29 were unsubstantiated; five were ‘unfounded.’”
Decades-Old Gang Laws Are Being Used to Target Black Lives Matter Protesters
Ali Winston
Decades-Old Gang Laws Are Being Used to Target Black Lives Matter Protesters
09 September 2020
By using gang laws, authorities can do an end run around First Amendment protections on freedom of association
San Quentin Death Sentence
David Bacon
San Quentin Death Sentence
29 July 2020
Prisoners’ supporters and loved ones demanded release of half the population and no transfers between prisons or to ICE.
#WE TOO 
Shaka Shakur
#WE TOO 
08 July 2020
If there can be no peace without justice, then there can never be peace while the US Prison Gulag exists.
BAR Book Forum: Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Nicole Fleetwood’s “Marking Time”
01 July 2020
Incarcerated activists have so many tools and skills to teach about resisting brutal regimes.
My Student Comes Home from Prison
Chris Hedges
My Student Comes Home from Prison
01 July 2020
In 1990, Lawrence Bell was 14, orphaned and living in an abandoned house when three Camden cops pressured him to sign a confession of murder.
BAR Book Forum: Symposium on Sarah Haley’s "No Mercy Here" 
Rhondda Robinson Thomas
BAR Book Forum: Symposium on Sarah Haley’s "No Mercy Here" 
27 May 2020
In white patriarchy-ruled South Carolina at the turn of the 20th century, manhood sometimes created temporary yet tenuous bonds between Black and w

More Stories


  • Trump as Othello in a Corporate Theater
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    Trump as Othello in a Corporate Theater
    21 Jan 2021
    Trump the straw man has finally been knocked down, giving the Democrats a victory that costs their corporate masters nothing.
  • The Left Lens: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and American Empire, with Ajamu Baraka
    Danny Haiphong and Margaret Kimberley
    The Left Lens: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and American Empire, with Ajamu Baraka
    20 Jan 2021
    Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday is often celebrated without any regard for his radical political legacy.
  • Freedom Rider: Why the Left Don’t Protest
    Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
    Freedom Rider: Why the Left Don’t Protest
    20 Jan 2021
    The worse the political and economic crisis becomes, the more lethargic the US left behaves – as if generations of collaboration with corporate Democrats has sucked the life out of the left.
  • Return to the Source: Democracy is Dead
    Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    Return to the Source: Democracy is Dead
    20 Jan 2021
    By what stretch of the imagination can the US be a democracy when ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does? 
  • Uganda: Bobi Wine Rocks the Vote but Museveni Claims Victory
    Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Uganda: Bobi Wine Rocks the Vote but Museveni Claims Victory
    20 Jan 2021
    Ugandan pop star turned presidential candidate Bobi Wine is not Sankara or Lumumba, but he has risked his life to mount a fierce challenge to the 36-year dictatorship of President Yoweri Museveni.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us