Last week’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Edwards v. Vannoy means that while convictions by nonunanimous juries can no longer happen in Louisiana, people who have been convicted by nonunanimous juries in years past are not retroactively affected by that ban.
Thedrick Edwards was sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted by a split jury (11 of 12 jurors on some crimes and 10 of 12 on others) on charges including aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping (two counts), and armed robbery (five counts) from a 2006 crime spree in Baton Rouge. In his appeal, Edwards and his attorneys filed a habeas corpus petition alleging the nonunanimous verdict was a violation of his Constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict, according to the Supreme Court’s explanation of the decision.
The Supreme Court ruled the decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, which requires a unanimous jury decision for a conviction, does not apply to cases decided by split juries in the past.
Jamila Johnson, managing attorney for the Promise of Justice Initiative's Jim Crow Juries Project, called the decision in this case “unfortunate” but also called the decision a “monumental” one.
“My general comment... is that it’s unfortunate. It was a clear example of the Supreme Court not valuing the lives of the primarily black and brown individuals who remain in Louisiana’s prison system with these split-jury verdicts,” Johnson told the Louisiana Record. “It also is monumental in that it is a complete shift away from the test that has been in place for the last 32 years and took from people for future cases the opportunity to argue for retroactivity to the federal courts.”
On May 17, following the Supreme Court’s decision, Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry issued a statement.
“As the late great Justice Antonin Scalia famously and correctly opined, ‘The right to jury trial is fundamental to our system of criminal procedure, and states are bound to enforce the Sixth Amendment’s guarantees as [the Supreme Court] interprets them.' But it does not follow that, when a criminal defendant has had a full trial and one round of appeals in which the state faithfully applied the Constitution as [the Supreme Court] understood it at the time, he may nevertheless continue to litigate his claims indefinitely in hopes that [the Supreme Court] will one day have a change of heart,’” Landry said in the statement, according to the Louisiana Department of Justice. “It is a victory for Louisiana crime victims, like the ones whom Thedrick Edwards confessed to raping, robbing and kidnapping.”
Although the Supreme Court did not provide relief to those in Louisiana and Oregon convicted by split juries, Johnson says that there are opportunities for those individuals to gain relief.
“Ultimately it leaves state options available for those states who choose to take their obligation to look at their retroactivity doctrine seriously,” Johnson said.
“In April of 2020, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the Ramos case, what they were doing was making it clear that everybody who was in the pipeline, regardless of when their conviction occurred, had a right to a unanimous jury verdict. Everybody on direct appeal and who had pending cases that were going to be tried, with the possibility of a nonunanimous verdict, got the same protections that had been available in 48 other states: the right to a jury trial with a unanimous jury.”