Ramos v. Louisiana
Wikipedia · Justia (with opinion) · Docket · oyez.org
Argued on Oct 7, 2019.Decided on Apr 20, 2020.
Petitioner: Evangelisto Ramos.Respondent: State of Louisiana.
Advocates: Jeffrey L. Fisher (for the petitioner)
Elizabeth Murrill (for the respondent)
Facts of the case (from oyez.org)
Evangelisto Ramos was charged with second-degree murder and exercised his right to a jury trial. After deliberating, ten of the twelve jurors found that the prosecution had proven its case against Ramos beyond a reasonable doubt, while two jurors reached the opposite conclusion. Under Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury verdict law, agreement of only ten jurors is sufficient to enter a guilty verdict, so Ramos was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Ramos appealed his case, and the state appellate court affirmed the lower court. The Louisiana Supreme Court denied review.

Question
Does the Fourteenth Amendment fully incorporate the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a unanimous verdict against the states?

Conclusion
The Sixth Amendment, as incorporated against the states, requires that a jury find a criminal defendant guilty by a unanimous verdict. Justice Neil Gorsuch authored the primary opinion.
In Part I, Justice Neil Gorsuch (writing for a majority: himself and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Brett Kavanaugh) noted that the original public meaning of the Sixth Amendment's right to trial by jury, as well as its history, support an interpretation that it requires guilt be determined by a unanimous jury. Because this right is “fundamental to the American scheme of justice,” it is incorporated against the states (that is, it applies to state governments as well) by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous verdict to support a conviction in state court.
In Part II-A, Justice Gorsuch, writing for the same majority, explained how the Court’s jurisprudence came to allow Oregon and Louisiana to permit non-unanimous jury verdicts, describing the fractured plurality opinions in those cases (Apodaca v. Oregon and Johnson v. Louisiana) with a fifth vote from Justice Lewis Powell that was “neither here nor there” but effectively permitted those states to proceed with non-unanimous jury verdicts.
In Part II-B, Justice Gorsuch wrote for a plurality of the Court (himself, and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor), describing the confusion surrounding the Apodaca decision and the apparent conflict in the Court’s precedent as to whether the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous jury verdicts.
In Part III, Justice Gorsuch, again writing for the majority, rejected Louisana’s arguments for non-unanimous jury verdicts, finding that the drafting history of the Sixth Amendment is ambiguous at best, the Apodaca plurality’s reasoning was “skimpy,” and most importantly, that the Apodaca plurality “subjected the ancient guarantee of a unanimous jury verdict to its own functionalist assessment.”
In Part IV-A, Justice Gorsuch, writing for a plurality (himself and Justices Ginsburg and Breyer), addressed the dissent’s argument that the principle of stare decisis required the Court to stand by its decision in Apodaca and uphold Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury law. Justice Gorsuch argued that under no view can the plurality opinion in Apodaca be controlling on today’s Court.
Writing again for a majority in Part IV-B-1, Justice Gorsuch noted that even if the Court accepted the premise that Apodaca established a precedent, no one on the Court today would say it was rightly decided, and “stare decisis isn’t supposed to be the art of methodically ignoring what everyone knows to be true.”
For the four-justice plurality (Justice Kavanaugh did not join this part), Justice Gorsuch in Part IV-B-2 addressed the reliance interest Louisiana and Oregon have in the security of their final criminal judgments. Justice Gorsuch minimized the significance of the state’s