Will The Louisiana Supreme Court Uphold LWOP For Defendants Convicted With Non-Unanimous Verdicts?

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Ramos v. Louisiana (U.S. October 2019) that non-unanimous state court jury verdicts in felony cases, allowed under a procedurally quirky U.S. Supreme Court precedent from 1972 that only two U.S. states, Louisiana and Oregon, availed themselves of, were unconstitutional. This happened around the same time that Louisiana, one of the two states, amended its constitution to prohibit such verdicts based upon a ballot issue decided in the 2018 general election. 

But in a follow up case, Edwards v. Vannoy (U.S. 2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held, along the usual 6-3 conservative-liberal divide in the court, that this ruling was not retroactive to cases in which direct appeals had been exhausted already, because it was not a "watershed rule" of criminal procedure.

Now, the Louisiana Supreme Court has taken a case to decide, as a matter of state constitutional law independent of federal law and not subject to review by any other court, if the ban on non-unanimous verdicts will be applied retroactively. The defendant in the test case has currently served 29 years in prison of a life without possibility of parole sentence, based upon a 10-2 jury verdict that would have resulted in an immediate retrial in 48 other states and in the federal courts.

I have no idea how the Louisiana Supreme Court is likely to rule, and it makes sense that it would take up the case, even if it is planning to hold that the ruling is not retroactive, because this exactly clean and narrow legal issue is outcome determinative in so many cases.

About 1500 cases are affected by the ruling and would have to be retried if the law is applied retroactively to cases that are now cold. The defendants are mostly serving life possibility of parole sentences, because shorter sentences are either still eligible to benefit from the new law because they are still on direct appeal, or have been full served.

The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide if a ban on non-unanimous jury verdicts applies retroactively under the state constitution, as it considers the case of a man convicted of murder and sentenced to life for a 1993 slaying in Plaquemines Parish.

The case of Reginald Reddick, who was convicted by a 10-2 jury vote that is no longer allowed, sets up a decision by the state’s highest court that could affect as many as 1,500 Louisiana inmates, most of them serving life sentences without parole.

Convicted by split juries years ago, their appeals exhausted, those inmates missed a shot at new trials when the U.S. Supreme Court last year refused to make its 2020 ban on divided juries retroactive. Still, advocates have argued that the high court's ruling doesn't prevent the Louisiana Supreme Court from deciding that those older split verdicts violate the state's constitution and should be tossed.

From here. 

As previous coverage from the same newspaper noted:

In Louisiana, four in five of the 1,500-plus inmates serving time under split jury decisions are Black; more than one in four has served at least 20 years already. The longest-serving inmate known to have been convicted by a split jury has been incarcerated since 1967. . . . 

The roster includes more than 900 inmates who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole -- a terminal sentence in which Louisiana, which incarcerates more people per-capita than any other state, easily leads the nation.

The older the case is, the less troubling to public safety a vacated conviction that is impracticable to retry would be, because the reality is that inmates who serve long sentences tend to "age out" of the time period where they are prone to commit crime and have low recidivism rates. 

This is balanced against the fact that more recent convictions, where the risk of recidivism if a defendant was rightfully convicted in a split verdict that would not have to have been retried before the defendant was convicted, are typically easier to retry.

Non-Unanimous Verdicts Produce More Wrongful Convictions

The risk of non-unanimous verdicts leading to wrongful convictions in Louisiana was real. In Louisiana, 40% of exonerated criminal defendants were found guilty by non-unanimous juries.

Jury verdicts aren't terribly accurate in the first place. As I've noted before, judges and juries agree on the verdict in roughly 78% of criminal jury trials. But judges are much less likely to acquit defendants than juries do (3% v. 19%+), and there are a small but significant number of wrongful convictions by juries (3.3% to 5% in death qualified capital murder-rape cases, and probably somewhat less in ordinary felony cases).

A very large percentage of criminal cases (95% would be typical), however, are resolved by plea bargains, which also sometimes result in wrongful convictions, although for mostly different reasons.

So, while the percentage of wrongful convictions in cases that actually go to trial is troubling high, the percentage of all cases that are wrongful convictions as a result of inaccurate jury verdicts is a much smaller share of criminal convictions (about one in 500).

Given that 18% of known exonerees pleaded guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, which suggest that the rate at which people plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit is at least about one in 2,375, although this is surely an underestimate since not all people who plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit are exonerated, in part, because there are stronger procedural bars to doing so, and in part, because people are less likely to challenge the often shorter sentence received as a result of a plea bargained conviction. (About 65% of 418 exonerees who pleaded guilty were people of color, and 83% of DNA exoneration plea cases resulted in identification of the alternate perpetrator.)