A Louisiana State Senate panel voted earlier this month to table a bill that would have provided a way for inmates convicted by non-unanimous juries to challenge their sentences after such jury verdicts were designated unconstitutional.
The Senate Judiciary B committee deferred Senate Bill 383 by Sen. Royce Duplessis (D-New Orleans) on a 4-3 vote on April 9. The move was criticized by inmate rights groups that report about 1,000 Louisiana inmates have been convicted on non-unanimous jury verdicts.
Such verdicts have come under judicial scrutiny in recent years by both federal and state courts. Louisiana voters in 2018 voted in favor of a state constitutional amendment outlawing non-unanimous jury verdicts, and a year later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such split verdicts violated the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution. The Louisiana Supreme Court later refused to apply the federal ruling on non-unanimous verdicts retroactively, effectively leaving the decision up to the state Legislature.
Only two states – Oregon and Louisiana – were affected by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on split verdicts, but the states reacted in different ways. The Oregon Supreme Court opted to allow inmates in that state who were convicted of non-unanimous juries to have their cases reconsidered, but Louisiana so far has not provided any post-conviction relief to inmates convicted by split juries.
“Louisiana is the only state where hundreds of people with non-unanimous jury convictions are incarcerated in prisons,” Hardell Ward, an attorney and director of community impact for the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI), said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “... We are deeply disappointed to see this committee abdicate its duty to address this injustice. We will continue to stand with the nearly 1,000 individuals and their families impacted by these illegal jury verdicts until they see the relief owed to them.”
SB 383 would have expanded the grounds for inmates to challenge their convictions. Currently, those grounds include evidence of double jeopardy, new DNA evidence indicating innocence or constitutional violations. But the bill would have allowed for consideration of new trials or other relief if an inmate was convicted on a split jury verdict.
The bill would have also created an exception in non-unanimous jury cases to a two-year time limitation for applications for post-conviction relief, according to the Legislature’s analysis of the bill.
Groups like PJI have argued that the use of non-unanimous juries had a racist intent since they have led to Black people being disproportionately incarcerated for more than a century, particularly during the Jim Crow era after Reconstruction.
“Louisiana lawmakers had the opportunity to address this racist history and to recognize the rights of Louisianans to a fair process and to freedom,” PJI Executive Director Samantha Kennedy said in a prepared statement. “(On April 9) they failed 1,000 people stuck in prison and their families. They failed all of us.”
The Louisiana District Attorneys Association expressed opposition to SB 383, saying that it would increase the workload of prosecutors around the state as they attempted to prepare for retrials of hundreds of old cases. In addition, locating witnesses in such cases from past decades would be a major challenge, according to the bill’s opponents.