BATON ROUGE — Louisiana is one of only two states in the country that allows a nonunanimous jury to convict a defendant of a felony, and a Louisiana lawmaker said it is time for the practice to end.
State Sen. J.P. Morrell, a Democrat, said the unusual rule is a remnant of the Jim Crow era, stemming from a constitutional convention in 1898 and long-standing efforts to maintain white supremacy after the Civil War.
“This is something that is wholly unnecessary that was born of this fusion of racism and disenfranchisement,” he said. “It’s a self-defeating, illogical position to have two jurors say, ‘We don’t think he did it,’ then prosecutors to say, ‘We met our reasonable doubt standard.’”
The senator has proposed a constitutional amendment to require all 12 jurors in felony cases to agree on a verdict. The measure is gaining steam in the state Capitol.
Serious felony trials in Louisiana, including some murder cases, can be resolved when 10 out of 12 jurors agree on a person’s guilt. Even Oregon, the only other state to allow split verdicts in felony cases, requires a unanimous verdict in murder cases. Morrell said the nonunanimous jury policy was instituted to minimize the voice of black jurors.
Angela Allen-Bell of the Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge said the current system results in “fast-tracking” people into prison. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the country.
“We are not making careful decisions of who is guilty,” she said.
It is difficult to gauge how many people have been imprisoned in Louisiana on split decisions, as not all prosecutors in the state maintain information on how juries vote. The Advocate newspaper’s analysis of felony trials over six years showed that 40 percent of 993 convictions came from split juries.
Sen. Mack “Bodi” White, a Republican who voted against the bill in committee and in the Senate, said that requiring unanimous juries may lead to more hung juries and costly retrials.
“I know it’s different in a jury trial, but it’s hard to get 12 out of 12 people in these times to just about agree on anything,” White said.