Nearly 1,000 people convicted by split juries remain in prison in Louisiana

Louisiana allowed split jury criminal convictions. If one or two jurors disagreed on a guilty verdict, the defendant could still be convicted. Oregon was the only other state to allow split verdicts.

Louisiana adopted the practice in 1898, fueled by efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War. Diluting the voice of Black jurors allowed the often-white majority to determine the outcome.

In 2018, Louisiana voters did away with the use of nonunanimous jury convictions. Two years later in 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that juries in state criminal trials must be unanimous to convict a defendant, settling a quirk of constitutional law that had allowed divided votes to result in convictions in Louisiana and Oregon.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court that the practice is inconsistent with the Constitution’s right to a jury trial and that it should be discarded as a vestige of Jim Crow laws in Louisiana and racial, ethnic and religious bigotry that led to its adoption in Oregon in the 1930s.

Of the 1,500 people in Louisiana prisons from split jury convictions at that time, about 80% were Black and most were serving life sentences, according to a Project of Justice Initiative analysis.

Following the high court decision, Oregon’s Supreme Court granted new trials to hundreds of people. But Louisiana’s Supreme Court rejected arguments to apply the ruling retroactively, leaving people locked up with scarce legal options or waiting on a miracle.

Nearly 1,000 people convicted by split juries remain in prison in Louisiana.

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