Louisiana's unique law that allows a jury to send a
person to prison for life without the consent of all 12 jurors did not happen
by accident, reports the New Orleans Advocate.
The drafters of the state constitution Louisiana adopted in
1898 said they aimed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in
Louisiana,” primarily by scrubbing from the rolls nearly all of the roughly
130,000 black people then registered to vote.
But delegates knew they couldn’t simply ban black people
from the voting booth or jury service without running afoul of the 14th and
15th amendments. The U.S. Supreme Court had explicitly said so. Instead, the
jury laws those delegates drew up allowed for convictions with only nine of 12
jurors agreeing, meaning that if one, two or even three black people made it
onto a jury, their votes wouldn’t matter.
These days, 10 votes are required for conviction instead of
the original nine, and today’s defenders of split verdicts say Louisiana’s law
now stands not for racism but for efficiency, by limiting hung juries and
potential retrials.
But the effects are the same, according to an exhaustive,
first-of-its-kind analysis by The Advocate.
The Advocate reviewed about 3,000 felony trials over six
years, turning up 993 convictions rendered by 12-member Louisiana juries in
which the newspaper was able to document the jury votes.
The remainder included trials ending in hung juries, those
halted by last-minute plea deals, lesser felony trials with six-member juries
and many others with scant records.
Although the majority-verdict law disadvantages all
defendants, the newspaper’s review found that its effects on black people
accused of crimes are especially profound. It acts as a capstone to a trial
system that becomes more tilted against black defendants at each stage: when
jurors are summoned, when they’re picked for juries, and in deliberation rooms
where voices of dissent can be ignored.
Black people make up roughly one-third of the population in
Louisiana, but they comprise two-thirds of state prisoners and three-fourths of
inmates serving life without parole. Louisiana, America’s incarceration
capital, also leads the nation by far in these life sentences, nearly all of
them the result of jury verdicts.
The newspaper’s analysis found that 40 percent of trial
convictions came over the objections of one or two holdouts. When the defendant
was black, the proportion went up to 43 percent, versus 33 percent for white
defendants. In three-quarters of the 993 cases in the newspaper's database, the
defendant was black.
In many cases, black defendants are not being judged by
juries “of their peers” — at least not racially speaking. The newspaper
scrutinized what happened to nearly 41,000 prospective jurors who reported for
duty in felony trials in nine of the state’s 10 busiest courthouses and found
that these jury pools were whiter than their communities, and the juries picked
from them were whiter still.
The average jury in East Baton Rouge Parish, for instance,
has nearly two fewer black people than it would if the panel reflected the
population. In St. Tammany Parish, juries have about half as many black members
as the parish's population.
Oregon, the only other state to allow split verdicts in
felony cases, demands unanimity when the charge is murder.
If that 10-2 scenario arose in any of the other 49 states,
the judge likely would order the jurors to keep working until one side swayed
the other to reach unanimity — or until the deadlock was too hopeless to break.
Then, the judge would declare a hung jury and a mistrial.
Yet another possible outcome would be a compromise, with the
jurors settling on a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder.
It’s hard to predict which way the chips would fall, even
for some dissenting jurors themselves.
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