Non-unanimous jury verdicts are a vestige of slavery and should be overturned 

In an amicus brief filed last week, civil rights lawyers urged the Louisiana Supreme Court to throw out all non-unanimous verdicts. Pointing out that so-called Jim Crow juries helped Louisiana reproduce a system of white domination following the Civil War, the lawyers argue that non-unanimous verdicts violate the 13th Amendment, which was intended to abolish slavery. 

After the Supreme Court ruled non-unanimous verdicts in felony cases unconstitutional in 2020, about 1,500 people convicted by split juries filed petitions for relief in Louisiana. But state circuit courts diverged on whether the constitutional ban should apply retroactively. In State of Louisiana vs. Reginald Reddick, the state’s Supreme Court will rule on this question. 

In their brief, lawyers from the Center of Constitutional Rights and Bill Quigley of Loyola Law School say non-unanimous verdicts violate not only the fair trial rights of the 6th and 14th Amendments but also the 13th Amendment. Because the 13th Amendment was meant to remedy the horrors of slavery and the various forms of racial oppression that emanated from it, the ban on non-unananious verdicts should be retroactive, they say. 

“The non-unanimous jury system was a flagrant betrayal of the promises of Reconstruction, an intentional subversion of the rights that grant full and unequivocal freedom for Black Americans,” said our staff attorney Angelo Guisado. 

Continue reading about this latest development on our website. For more, visit our case page.

On the passing of our friend and ally, Kathy Boudin 

Our hearts go out to our dear friend Kathy Boudin’s family and friends, and to all whose lives she impacted, particularly to her life partner, David, and her son and our former colleague, Chesa. During and after her imprisonment, Kathy was a creative and tireless advocate for imprisoned people. Her work and community-centered approach inspired so many of us, and we will honor her tremendous legacy by striving to uphold her ideals, which she articulated in 2013:

"If we could get under the stereotypes and the stigma that are attached to people who have committed violent crimes and be able to see the person underneath it and understand that holding them in prison has nothing to do with them being a public risk, nothing to do with whether they’ve transformed themselves, nothing to do with the community that they can serve, if we can get under that and know that they’re being kept in only for the purpose of punishment, then maybe we can look at the entire system and be able to change it."

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