Alabama executes man for murder of a police officer

The 5th Execution of 2020

The controversial execution of Nathaniel Woods was carried out on March 5, 2020 in Alabama just minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a temporary stay, issued only hours earlier, reported ABC News.

Woods was pronounced dead at 9:01 p.m. local time, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections.

Advocates had argued Woods, who was convicted in the murder of three police officers in 2004, did not directly take part in the slayings and should have his execution delayed.

The decision came after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey reviewed the letter requesting a reprieve from the death sentence, but said she would allow the execution to proceed.

"Governor Ivey does not presently intend to exercise her powers of commutation or reprieve in this case," general counsel William G. Parker Jr. wrote. "While Governor Ivey reserves the right to grant clemency at any time before an execution is carried out, she has determined, based on her review of the complete record, including the matters presented in your letter, that clemency for Mr. Woods at this hour is unwarranted."

Woods, 44, was killed by lethal injection at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama.

"The fight is far from over. Nathaniel is an innocent man, and that will always be the truth. We are not giving up," the family said in a statement provided to ABC News.

Supporters were calling for Ivey to grant a reprieve. As of Thursday morning, Ivey offered no sign that she would intervene in Williams' case and it appeared the execution would go as planned.

Nathaniel Woods in an undated photo from the Alabama Dept. of Corrections. Martin Luther King, III, the son of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as family members of Woods, a condemned Alabama inmate, are asking the governor to to stop his execution. Woods is scheduled to be executed on Thursday, March 5, 2020. Woods and co-defendant Kerry Spencer were convicted of capital murder for the 2004 killings of three Birmingham police officers.Alabama Dept. of Corrections via AP

But late Thursday, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a temporary stay in the minutes leading up to the execution of Woods, who was convicted of capital murder in the 2004 killings of three Birmingham, Alabama, police officers.

He already requested his final meal of sweet potatoes, spinach, chicken patty, chicken leg quarter, cooked apples, fries, two oranges and orange flavored drink, according to a statement from Alabama Department of Corrections. However, he only took one bite of the chicken and left the rest of his meal untouched, the statement read.

Woods also made calls earlier that day to his father, sister, daughter and mother, as well as friends. His imam was expected to be the only person present at the execution.

At news of the temporary stay, the son of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., who had joined a chorus of calls to halt the execution, praised the move.

"Amazing news!! The Supreme Court has issued a stay of execution for Nathaniel Woods!! Great work everyone!" Martin Luther King III wrote on Twitter.

Corrections told ABC News that the execution warrant did not run out until 11:59 p.m., meaning they had until then to carry out the execution once the court decided to lift the temporary stay.

On Tuesday, King sent a letter to Ivey, a Republican, reading, "I stand with hundreds of thousands of Americans across Alabama and the nation, pleading with you not to execute Nathaniel Woods."

In his letter, King, who was born in Alabama, told Ivey her state was "set to kill a man who is very likely innocent."

King told Fox News Thursday, "If a person is innocent, they should not be killed in this country. People have been killed and [hanged] for doing nothing. And in this context, if that is the prospect, we ought to at least go through the facts, go through the information, give the system the opportunity to work if it did not work."

As of Thursday afternoon, more than 91,000 people had signed a petition on the website Change.org to stop the execution of Woods, who would become the first person executed in Alabama this year and the 67th since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Ivey noted two Alabama citizens had been executed since 1983 as being accomplices to capital murder.

Woods' alleged accomplice, Kerry Spencer, confessed to being the sole gunman who killed the officers with a high-powered weapon, but separate juries convicted him and Woods of four capital murder charges, including killing the officers in the course of committing another crime.

"The state offered the testimony of 39 witnesses at Woods' capital murder trial, including Officer Michael Collins, 25 other law enforcement officers, and forensic experts," Ivey wrote in a lengthy statement announcing Woods' execution. "There is no evidence, and no argument has been made, that Nathaniel Woods tried to stop the gunman from committing these heinous crimes. In fact, he later bragged about his participation in these horrific murders. As such, the jury did not view Woods' acts as those of an innocent bystander; they believed that he was a fully engaged participant."

Gov. Kay Ivey gives the State of the State Address to a joint session of the Alabama Legislature, Feb. 4, 2020, in the old house chamber of the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Ala.Vasha Hunt/AP

Spencer's trial was held before Woods' case was heard by a jury, but his execution date has yet to be set.

During both trials, prosecutors presented the juries the theory that Woods and Spencer acted in tandem to lure the officers into the apartment to kill them.

On June 17, 2004, Birmingham police officers Carlos Owen, Harley Chisholm III and Charles Bennett were shot to death while executing a misdemeanor assault warrant for Woods at a suspected crack house in Birmingham. A fourth officer was also shot, but survived and testified against Woods.

A jury convicted Woods in December 2005, and in a nonunanimous verdict of 10-2 recommended a sentence of death.

Chisholm's sister has come out against the execution, saying in a statement to ABC News provided by Wood's family: "I am writing to express my sincere wishes for Governor Ivey to stop the execution of Nathaniel Woods. I am the sister of Harley Chisholm III. I do not think that Nathaniel is guilty of murder. I urge Governor Ivey to reconsider her decision not to intervene."

"There is no harm in allowing more time for the courts to investigate," the statement added. "I want the new evidence to be brought forward and evaluated by new attorneys. Please do not move forward with the hasty decision to execute Nathaniel. My conscience will not let me live with this if he dies. I beg you to have mercy on him."

Alabama State Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement Wednesday that Woods was "correctly found guilty and sentenced to death by a jury of his peers."

"The only injustice in the case of Nathaniel Woods is that which was inflicted on those four policemen that terrible day in 2004," Marshall said in the statement.

Woods appealed his conviction, arguing his lawyer gave him inadequate representation by misinforming him that he could not be convicted of capital murder as an accomplice and convincing him to reject a plea deal prosecutors offered him of 20 to 25 years in prison, according to court records.

"A jury of Mr. Woods' peers convicted him of four counts of capital murder," Ivey wrote Thursday night. "In the past 15 years, his conviction has been reviewed at least nine times, and no court has found any reason to overturn the jury's decision."

Woods' appeal was denied by the Alabama Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

In his letter to Ivey, King stated that Woods "has never had a fair trial" and has not gotten the opportunity to present new evidence since his conviction bolstering his claim that Spencer acted alone and that there was never a plan to lure the officers into an ambush.

To read more CLICK HERE

Colorado police charge 10-year-old with felony for pointing toy gun at passing car

Gavin Carpenter was pretending to be a character in the video game “Fortnite” on July 24, when he spooked a driver by pointing a toy rifle with an orange tip at the man’s truck. The gun was fake, but the felony charge filed against a 10-year-old boy was very real, reported the Washington Post.

The driver slammed on his brakes, causing the tires to screech against the pavement. Then, he began yelling at Gavin and his friend, who had aimed a bright orange Nerf crossbow at the truck.

The man followed the bewildered boys, who ran into a grandparent’s nearby home in Colorado Springs. Video captured by a Ring doorbell camera shows the man yelling at an adult who answered the door.

“I don’t know what kind of gun it is. It was some kind of gun,” the unnamed driver shouted.

“Would you like to watch your mouth, please?” someone said from inside the home.

“How about this?” the man continued to yell. “How about I call the [expletive] cops?”

Minutes later, El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies handcuffed Gavin, who was 10 years old at the time. Officers escorted Gavin to a booking center, where he was fingerprinted and had a mug shot taken. Then, the boy was charged with a felony for menacing.

“I was, at the time, very scared,” Gavin told KXRM.

Seven months later, Gavin’s family made the story of his arrest and prosecution public, after successfully expunging the charge from the boy’s criminal record.

Gavin’s parents, Chris and Stefanie Carpenter, hired a lawyer and tried to persuade the district attorney to drop the case.

“It was just a hard no,” Chris Carpenter told KXRM. “The DA was not going to throw this out.”

Instead, Gavin entered a diversion program that required him to complete community service hours and submit his grades for the court to review, but it also allowed him to erase the charge from his criminal record if he completed the program.

To read more CLICK HERE 

More junk science--denim patterns on a pair of jeans

Is every pair of jeans like no other? According to the testimony of FBI forensic analysts, the patterns seen on denim are reliably unique and can be used to identify a suspect in surveillance footage, Ars Technica.

The problem is, this technique has never been subjected to thorough scrutiny, and evidence acquired through it may not be as strong as it has been claimed to be. A paper published in PNAS this week puts denim-pattern analysis through its paces, finding that it isn’t particularly good at matching up identical pairs of jeans—and may create a number of “false alarm” errors to boot.

Shoddy evidence

For some time, there have been rumblings about the reliability and quality of commonly used forensic techniques. In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences published a weighty report observing that, apart from nuclear DNA analysis, “no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source.”

The problems with forensic evidence—including fingerprint, bloodstain, and ballistics analysis—have terrible real-world consequences. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, nearly a quarter of wrongful convictions in the United States for the last 30 years can be attributed to flawed or misleading forensic evidence.

Computer scientists Sophie Nightingale and Hany Farid wanted to look at one technique in particular: photographic pattern analysis, which matches up the patterns of details on faces, hands, or clothing between suspects and crime-scene photographs. Jeans, for example, have a “barcode” pattern of dark and light splotches along their seams.

Denim barcodes

These patterns have been used as central evidence to convict people, but is this kind of analysis reliable? That hasn’t been established. To test it out, Nightingale and Farid went out to buy 100 pairs of jeans from second-hand stores. They laid the jeans out flat on a hard surface, photographed the seams along the legs, and digitally traced the pattern of light and dark points along the seams. To bump up their sample, they had Amazon Turk workers supply images from another 111 pairs, photographed using careful instructions.

Then, the researchers set about quantifying how different the patterns were across different pairs of jeans. Obviously, there’s a lot of randomness at play here—two pairs could be quite similar, just by chance, while another two pairs could be entirely different, also by chance. And most pairs would fall somewhere in the middle, with some degree of similarity. Based on these measurements, Nightingale and Farid worked out the range of similarity between the "barcode" patterns on different pairs of jeans.

The important question, of course, is whether these patterns can be used to determine whether two images show the same pair of jeans. So the researchers selected 10 pairs of jeans and took 10 photos of each using different cameras, in different lighting, and with different draping. What they found was that any given pair of photos could come back with a lot of similarities but could also come back with very different readings on the pattern. The range was broad—as Nightingale and Farid point out, soft fabric photographed in a bunch of different ways is going to have distortions that vary from one image to the next.

False alarms

So if one pair of jeans can look noticeably different in different photos, is denim-pattern analysis actually a useful forensic technique? The researchers used their measurements to estimate how often a true match would come up and how often their jeans would throw up a “false alarm“—a score that looked like a match even though the images actually came from two different pairs.

They found that the false alarm rate could be as high as one in a thousand. Given that the FBI has reported using photographic pattern analysis in hundreds of cases each year, that’s a meaningful possibility. The true match rate was also not great, at around 40 to 50 percent, depending on factors like the length of the seam being analyzed.

This means the technique of matching up jeans is likely to be pretty hit and miss—not catching actual similarities a lot of the time and possibly throwing up a high rate of false alarms. And that’s under controlled experimental conditions using high-quality images and jeans laid out nice and flat, not grainy security footage showing jeans being worn. On the other hand, different features like damage, branding, and size could corroborate an analysis to improve the evidence one way or another.

There’s more work needed on whether jeans could be analyzed in a more reliable way using additional features—and also whether other pattern analysis—like freckles on a face or patterns on other types of clothing—are similarly unreliable. But for now, write Nightingale and Farid, “identification based on denim jeans should be used with extreme caution, if at all.”

To read more CLICK HERE

D.C. judge debunks junk forensic evidence

Washington Post columnist Radley Balko applauds D.C. judge's on opinion on junk science:

This brings me to the September D.C. opinion of United States v. Marquette Tibbs, written by Associate Judge Todd E. Edelman. In this case, the prosecution wanted to put on a witness who would testify that the markings on a shell casing matched those of a gun discarded by a man who had been charged with murder. The witness planned to testify that after examining the marks on a casing under a microscope and comparing it with marks on casings fired by the gun in a lab, the shell casing was a match to the gun.

This sort of testimony has been allowed in thousands of cases in courtrooms all over the country. But this type of analysis is not science. It’s highly subjective. There is no way to calculate a margin for error. It involves little more than looking at the markings on one casing, comparing them with the markings on another and determining whether they’re a “match.” Like other fields of “pattern matching” analysis, such as bite-mark, tire-tread or carpet-fiber analysis, there are no statistics that analysts can produce to back up their testimony. We simply don’t know how many other guns could have created similar markings. Instead, the jury is simply asked to rely on the witness’s expertise about a match.

Because this sort of testimony has been accepted by courts thousands of times over, it would have been easy and relatively unremarkable for Edelman to have cited those decisions and allowed the evidence. He could have argued that any doubts about the evidence could have been addressed by the defense during cross examination or by putting on its own expert. Instead, Edelman held a thorough evidentiary hearing, known as a Daubert hearing (named for a Supreme Court case on the admissibility of scientific evidence), personally reviewed the testimony and scientific literature, and reached a conclusion.

Here’s the heart of the opinion:

After conducting an extensive evidentiary hearing in this case—one that involved detailed testimony from a number of distinguished expert witnesses, review of all of the leading studies in the discipline, pre- and post-hearing briefing, and lengthy arguments by skilled and experienced counsel—this Court ruled on August 8, 2019 that application of the Daubert factors requires substantial restrictions on specialized opinion testimony in this area. Based largely on the inability of the published studies in the field to establish an error rate, the absence of an objective standard for identification, and the lack of acceptance of the discipline’s foundational validity outside of the community of firearms and toolmark examiners, the Court precluded the government from eliciting testimony identifying the recovered firearm as the source of the recovered cartridge casing. Instead, the Court ruled that the government’s expert witness must limit his testimony to a conclusion that, based on his examination of the evidence and the consistency of the class characteristics and microscopic toolmarks, the firearm cannot be excluded as the source of the casing. The Court issues this Memorandum Opinion to further elucidate the ruling it made in open court.

Note that Edelman did not rule that the witness couldn’t testify at all. He ruled that the witness could testify only to conclusions backed by scientific research. The witness could tell the jury that he could not exclude the gun as the weapon that produced the casing. But he could not say it’s a match because such a conclusion could not be proved.

This is an important distinction. Even the most strident critics of these fields of forensics don’t claim that they’re useless. Even bite-mark analysis can have some (minimal) investigative value. If there are clear bite marks all over a victim, for example, and the main suspect has no teeth, it seems safe to say that the suspect isn’t the source of the bites.

But it’s useful to compare fields like this with single-source DNA evidence, which is backed by science. DNA analysts don’t tell jurors that a suspect is a match. Instead, they use percentages. Because we know the frequency with which specific DNA markers are distributed across the population, analysts can calculate the odds that anyone other than the suspect was the source of the DNA in question. We can’t do that with marks on shell casings, or bite marks, or pry marks on a door because there is no way of knowing how many different guns or teeth or crowbars might, under the right conditions, produce identical marks.

What is remarkable about Edelman’s opinion is he acknowledges that his ruling will be unusual and that it will cut against nearly every court to rule before him, including appellate courts. But he issues it anyway, because it happens to be correct.

Judges across the United States have considered similar challenges to firearms and toolmark identification evidence. Of course, “for many decades ballistics testimony was accepted almost without question in most federal courts in the United States.” Based on the pleadings in this case, as well as the Court’s own research, there do not appear to be any reported cases in which this type of evidence has been excluded in its entirety. Earlier this year, the United States District Court for the District of Nevada also surveyed the relevant case law and concluded that no federal court had found the method of firearms and toolmark examination promoted by AFTE—the method generally used by American firearms examiners and employed by Mr. Coleman in this case—to be unreliable.

Nevertheless, he determines that the guiding principle here should not be precedent. It should be science.

In evaluating the persuasive weight of these decisions, however, the undersigned could not help but note that, despite the enhanced gatekeeping role demanded by Daubert, see 509 U.S. at 589, the overwhelming majority of the reported post-Daubert cases regarding this type of expert opinion testimony have not engaged in a particularly extensive or probing analysis of the evidence’s reliability. In 2009, the National Research Council (“NRC”) specifically criticized the judiciary’s treatment of issues relating to the admissibility of firearms and toolmark evidence and the judiciary’s failure to apply Daubert in a meaningful fashion. In the NRC’s view, “[t]here is little to indicate that courts review firearms evidence pursuant to Daubert’s standard of reliability.” …

Without disparaging the work of other courts, the NRC’s critique of our profession rings true, at least to the undersigned: many of the published post-Daubert opinions on firearms and toolmark identification involved no hearing on the admissibility of the evidence or only a cursory analysis of the relevant issues.

Yet, the case law in this area follows a pattern in which holdings supported by limited analysis are nonetheless subsequently deferred to by one court after another. This pattern creates the appearance of an avalanche of authority; on closer examination, however, these precedents ultimately stand on a fairly flimsy foundation. The NRC credited Professor David Faigman—one of the defense experts who testified at the Daubert hearing in this matter—with the observation that trial courts defer to expert witnesses; appellate courts then defer to the trial courts; and subsequent courts then defer to the earlier decisions.

As someone who has been beating this drum for years, I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to see this in a court opinion. It’s just remarkable.

Under Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., the Supreme Court laid out markers that judges should look for when assessing scientific evidence, such as whether the methods in question are subject to peer review and whether the expert’s methods are generally accepted in the scientific community. Consequently, Daubert spawned cottage industries of forensic boards, certifying organizations and quasi-academic journals, all aimed at conferring legitimacy on dubious fields. When assessing a challenge to the scientific reliability of an entire discipline of forensics such as ballistics analysis or bite-mark analysis, then, too many judges have simply looked to these bogus boards and journals and concluded that the state’s expert and his or her methods are “generally accepted.”

But they’re accepted only by other experts within those same suspect fields. These judges neglect to assess how the entire field has been assessed by actual scientists. It’s like assessing the scientific validity of an astrologer by citing astrology journals or by consulting other astrologists.

In this case, the prosecution cited a publication called the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (AFTE) Journal, which it claimed had published “peer-reviewed” studies concluding that ballistics analysts had a low rate of error. In his opinion, Edelman deftly slices through this noise:

Overall, the AFTE Journal’s use of reviewers exclusively from within the field to review articles created for and by other practitioners in the field greatly reduces its value as a scientific publication, especially when considered in conjunction with the general lack of access to the journal for the broader academic and scientific community as well as its use of an open review process. …

Other courts considering challenges to this discipline under Daubert have concluded that publication in the AFTE Journal satisfies this prong of the admissibility analysis. …

It is striking, however, that these courts devote little attention to the sufficiency of this journal’s peer review process or to the issues stemming from a review process dominated by financially and professionally interested practitioners, and instead, mostly accept at face value the assertions regarding the adequacy of the journal’s peer review process. …

In the undersigned’s view, if Daubert, Motorola, and Rule 702 are to have any meaning at all, courts must not confine the relevant scientific community to the specific group of practitioners dedicated to the validity of the theory—in other words, to those whose professional standing and financial livelihoods depend on the challenged discipline. As Judge Jon M. Alander of the Superior Court of Connecticut aptly stated, “[i]t is self evident that practitioners accept the validity of the method as they are the ones using it. Were the relevant scientific community limited to practitioners, every scientific methodology would be deemed to have gained general acceptance.”

Edelman’s opinion is the Platonic ideal of a Daubert analysis. It ought to be the norm. But we should also be careful not to conclude that because Edelman did it correctly, other judges will too. Again, it’s just not realistic to expect people trained in law to accurately assess the validity of scientific evidence that sometimes gets quite complicated.

To read more CLICK HERE

Pennsylvania a leader in life without parole

Philadelphia County has 2,694 people serving life without parole sentences (LWOP), which is more than any other county in the United States and far more than any other country in the world, according to a new data analysis released by the Abolitionist Law Center.  A recent report on LWOP [Full Report] [Abridged Report] found Pennsylvania has 5,346 people in prison with no hope of being released, making the state a national leader in the use of the punishment; only Florida, with twice the population, has more people serving LWOP.
To read more CLICK HERE 

Majority of people support reexamination of old sentences

A new report and survey looks at popular support for two specific policies that would reduce the number of people in U.S. prisons, reported The Appeal. The policies—second-look legislation expanding release eligibility and sentencing review units in prosecutors’ offices—give prosecutors and judges the ability to revisit sentences handed down years, even decades, earlier. This is an option that many judges and at least some prosecutors have wanted. The survey was conducted by Data for Progress, and the report was the work of Data for Progress, the Justice Collaborative, and Fair and Just Prosecution.

In July, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey and Representative Karen Bass of California, both Democrats, introduced the Second Look Act. The bill was considered groundbreaking because it expanded the opportunity to be considered for resentencing available to anyone in federal prison who has served at least 10 years. It also created a presumption in favor of release for anyone 50 years or older. Significantly, it did not exclude people who had been originally sentenced for violent crimes. One advocate, Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project, told the Daily Appeal shortly after the Second Look Act’s introduction in Congress that she hoped it would offer a model for states to emulate.

Of the voters surveyed this month, 69 percent support “states adopting laws that allow for the re-examination of old sentences to provide a second chance for people who have been in prison for more than 10 years and who can be safely returned to the community.” Support even among “very conservative” voters was above 60 percent, while support among “very liberal” voters was above 80 percent. Nearly two-thirds of Republican voters expressed support.

There were similar levels of support for the second policy on which voters were surveyed—sentence review by prosecutors. In jurisdictions including Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Seattle, prosecutors have sought to remedy past injustices in the form of excessive sentences. In 2018, California passed a law giving prosecutors the power to recommend that judges reduce sentences “in the interest of justice.” Last year in New York, state Senator Zellnor Myrie introduced a bill to give similar power to prosecutors.

Despite a national movement to end mass incarceration, the pace of decarceration has been slow. In 2018, the Sentencing Project pointed out that, at the current rate, it would take 75 years just to cut the number of people in prison in the U.S. in half. And that would still leave more than a million people in prisons and jails.

The report’s authors describe the scale of the problem. Some of the most vivid illustrations of the United States’s outlier status are included: More people are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in Philadelphia than in every other country in the world. There are more people today condemned to die in prison than the entire prison population five decades ago. And nearly half of them are Black, a large overrepresentation not just relative to the general population but also to the population of people who are incarcerated. Nor do these millions of prison years mean greater public safety. A 2016 report from the Brennan Center for Justice posited that of the nearly 1.5 million people in state and federal prison, well over half a million of them could be immediately released or placed in programs instead.

The authors also review how we got here. In terms of policies, they write that, while the causes are manifold, “one key driver has been the use of excessive sentences and the failure to do anything about them.” A web of “mandatory minimums, ‘habitual offender’ and ‘three strikes’ sentence enhancements, and truth-in-sentencing laws” made sentences of extraordinary harshness possible for a wide array of crimes. The enormous discretion handed to prosecutors, and their willingness to use it in favor of incarceration, are other culprits.

Even amid a historical decline in crime, fearmongering around criminal justice reforms is the norm, as ongoing efforts to reverse recent reforms in New York demonstrate. Yet, the survey published today shows that for a majority of voters, of all ideological stripes, policies that allow prosecutors and judges to reassess a person’s sentence, in light of subsequent reforms and who that person is today, are common sense, not controversial.

To read more CLICK HERE

GateHouse: Supreme Court has second chance to end nonunanimous verdicts

Matthew T. Mangino

GateHouse Media

February 28, 2020

The United States Supreme Court may soon stamp-out the last bastion of state sanctioned racial inequality in the criminal justice system. The high court is weighing the constitutionality of nonunanimous verdicts in criminal trials, and is expected to hand down a decision very soon.

Oregon is the last state to permit less than a unanimous jury to convict a criminal defendant. Louisiana was the only other state to allow criminal convictions with nonunanimous verdicts, until the legislature changed the law in 2018.

Louisiana’s law grew out of the racist post-Reconstruction era and was an early example of the Jim Crow laws that attempted to keep newly freed slaves under the thumb of powerful southern landowners and sympathetic state and local leaders.

In 1880, Louisiana enacted a law permitting only nine of 12 jurors to convict. In 1898, the law became part of Louisiana’s Constitution - during a convention convened “to establish the supremacy of the white race in the state.”

Less than unanimous criminal convictions raise the risk that jurors from racial, ethnic or religious minorities will be ignored by a majority that knows it can return a verdict without their consent or agreement.

Ironically, the case before the court that could end Oregon’s racist law is out of the state of Louisiana. Evangelisto Ramos was convicted in 2016 - before the state changed the law - of second-degree murder on a 10-2 jury vote. He is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Oregon established itself as a less than unanimous verdict state more than 50 years after Louisiana, but Oregon’s motives were equally sinister. In the 1920s, Oregon had the largest Ku Klux Klan organization west of the Mississippi River. Laws often associated with the Jim Crow South were thriving in the great northwest. In 1922, Walter Pierce, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected governor of Oregon. He went on to serve five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 1933, a Jewish man, Jake Silverman, was implicated in the murder of a white man in Columbia County, Oregon. At Silverman’s trial, 11 of 12 jurors wanted to convict him of second-degree murder. However, a sole juror refused to support the majority view. After hours of deliberation, the jury came back with a compromise conviction of manslaughter.

The Klan dominated state was whipped into an Anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic frenzy.

The local paper blamed the verdict on “the vast immigration into America from southern and eastern Europe, of people untrained in the jury system.”

The following year, Oregon proposed a ballot initiative to allow felony convictions based on a less than unanimous verdict. The measure was coupled with providing defendant’s the right to waive a jury trial. The language contained in the ballot measure provided, “that in the circuit court 10 members of the jury may render a verdict of guilty or not guilty.” The initiative passed overwhelmingly with 58% of the vote.

From that point forward, Oregon has had the dubious distinction of being a state that authorized the influence of racism in its criminal justice system. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court had an opportunity to correct the error of Oregon’s way. However, the Court ruled that while the Constitution required federal juries to render unanimous verdicts, there was nothing in the Constitution to prevent states from permitting split decisions.

As the state braces for the Supreme Court’s ruling, there is agreement among the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyer’s Association and Oregon District Attorney’s Association that the law is a remnant of a dark and embarrassing past, and according to the Washington Post, “may have sent innocent people to prison.“
Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter at @MatthewTMangino.

To visit the column CLICK HERE