Stanford Law Clinic Wins Case, Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana’s Nonunanimous Jury Law

Stanford Law Clinic Wins Case, Supreme Court Rules Non-Unanimous Verdicts Unconstitutional in Serious Cases

This Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Evangelisto Ramos, overruling a 50-year-old case that allowed states to convict a criminal defendant by a nonunanimous jury verdict. Professor Jeffrey Fisher and students in the Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic represented Mr. Ramos in his appeal to the Court. Mr. Ramos had been convicted of second-degree murder in Louisiana after a brief trial in which two jurors dissented from the guilty verdict. Under Louisiana law at the time, a defendant could be convicted of a non-capital crime so long as 10 of the 12 jurors voted for conviction. The law was a relic of the Jim Crow era, part of a post-Reconstruction effort to undermine the influence African Americans had on juries. With help from the clinic and attorneys at The Promise of Justice Initiative, Mr. Ramos challenged his conviction, arguing that the nonunanimous verdict violated his Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury.

The Supreme Court agreed. By a vote of 6-3, the Court held that the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a unanimous jury verdict in criminal trials in both federal and state court. This week’s decision represents a major victory not only for Mr. Ramos, but for many defendants and prisoners across Louisiana and Oregon, the two states that have permitted nonunanimous verdicts in recent years. Under the Court’s decision in Ramos, if the states decide to retry those individuals, any verdict to convict will have to be unanimous.

For more information about the case and the experience of the student members of the team representing Mr. Ramos, read Is a Nonunanimous Jury Verdict Constitutional?

Esthena Barlow, JD ’20 (BA ’13), Gabe Bronshteyn, JD ’20, Liza Starr, JD ’20, and Alexandra Willingham, JD ’20, are the SLS students in the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic who worked on the Ramos case, which clinic director Jeff Fisher argued.