It might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that Louisiana just “ended 138 years of Jim Crow,” but state Sen. JP Morrell, D-New Orleans was entitled to feel elated when the election returns came in Tuesday night.
Morrell authored the legislation that called a referendum on a proposition to require unanimous jury verdicts for felony convictions as of the start of next year. Right now prosecutors need only 10 votes out of 12 to send a defendant to prison, even for life with no possibility of parole. Let nobody say the bleeding hearts went unheeded, however. Unanimity was still required for executions.
With passage of Morrell's constitutional amendment, which he initially regarded as a very long shot, Louisiana falls in line with every other state, save Oregon. Henceforth no accused will be sent to the Louisiana state pen unless all jurors are free of any reasonable doubt that he belongs there.
The majority-verdict provision was written into the constitution to make it easier for white jurors to convict — some would say railroad — a black defendant.
State voters jettisoned a 120-year-old mainstay of Louisiana justice Tuesday, overwhelmingly passing a constitutional amendment to require una…
White folks did not blush to declare a belief in their racial superiority at the time, and constitutional convention delegates clearly intended to ensure that, whenever a couple of black men were impaneled, their votes would be nugatory.
That is so obviously at odds with modern concepts of justice that Tuesday's vote has been widely welcomed. It was not, in the end, much of a surprise and such champions of the status quo as state Attorney General Jeff Landry piped down when they saw which way the wind was blowing.
It is an article of faith that trial by jury is one of the bulwarks of freedom bequeathed from medieval England, although it has obviously been a less solid one in Louisiana. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court's repeated refusal to throw out our majority-verdict law is one of the most glaring blots on its escutcheon.
But, as we congratulate ourselves on our belated embrace of a stricter standard, we should also concede that the notion that unanimous juries advance the cause of justice is by no means universally accepted. Some commentators have no faith in the jury system, however many votes are needed for a guilty verdict.
Mark Twain frequently mocked the idea that, when 12 citizens convene to decide the fate of an alleged felon, a previously unsuspected sagacity seizes them.
According to Twain, “The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.”
The organized backers of Amendment 2, which will require future Louisiana juries to return unanimous verdicts in all criminal cases, were caut…
Unanimous jury verdicts are integral to a justice system with its roots in medieval England, but they have not been insisted on over there for the last 50 years. Taking a similar stance to Twain's in our own time. prominent British journalist Simon Jenkins quoted a judge who dismissed a jury for its “fundamental deficit in understanding.” Jenkins opined that it’s time for juries to go “the way of the ducking stool.” The “expense, casual time-wasting and procedural nonsense might have some purpose if it offered swift and certain justice,” but, according to Jenkins, it doesn't.
The British government can deny defendants the right to a jury trial if it believes there is a threat of tampering. The law allowing that was not in force when Lord Devlin made his oft-quoted remark that jury trials are “the lamp which shows that freedom lives.”
In America, with its healthy distrust of government, that axiom still holds, and the Sixth Amendment guarantees all defendants a “speedy and public trial by an impartial jury.” A constitution designed to negate the votes of black jurors clearly fails the impartiality test, and we will be well rid of that provision come the New Year.
Email James Gill at Gill1407@bellsouth.net.
