NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Petitions have been filed in nearly 30 Louisiana criminal court cases to reverse convictions of people found guilty of serious crimes by non-unanimous juries, a criminal justice reform group said Wednesday.
The Promise of Justice Initiative also said more such efforts are planned. And its attorneys filed a brief Tuesday in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case that they hope will result in the reversal of all such cases in Louisiana - an estimated 1,500 to 1,600 of them.
In Louisiana, the non-unanimous jury requirement dates back to the Jim Crow era. It made for easier conviction and imprisonment of non-whites by allowing a 10- or 11-member majority of a jury to convict. Promise of Justice Initiative attorneys refer to such convictions as Jim Crow verdicts.
“They are a relic of white supremacy,” Mercedes Montagnes, the group’s executive director, said at a Wednesday on-line news conference.
Until recently, Louisiana was one of only two states - the other was Oregon - that allowed non-unanimous jury verdicts in felonies. Louisiana voters amended the state constitution in 2018 to outlaw non-unanimous felony convictions - but only for crimes that occurred after the amendment took effect.
The U.S. Supreme Court this year said such verdicts were unconstitutional in all state and federal courts. But the high court decision does not apply in cases where appeals have been exhausted.
The group hopes that changes with a decision in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case - Edwards v. Vannoy - which includes the question of whether this year’s decision on unanimous juries should apply retroactively.
The group’s friend-of-the-court brief, filed Tuesday, acknowledges arguments that making the case apply retroactively could cause more work for overburdened public defenders. But, it said, there are numerous attorneys already donating time to the cause. And, attorneys argued in the brief, Louisiana’s “intransigence” in failing to adequately fund defense for indigents “should not be double-counted as a reason not to uphold the promise of a unanimous verdict.”
Meanwhile, Promise of Justice Initiative, and its allies are filing in individual state cases.
“We have filed 26 already and are finalizing 4 more today,” Jamila Johnson, managing attorney for the initiative’s unanimous jury project, said in an email. “We hope to represent as many people who need to file as possible with the support of our national law firm partners.”
Loren Lampert, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the group hasn’t taken a position on the pending Supreme Court case on whether non-unanimous convictions should be thrown out retroactively. But the issue raises concerns, he said, in cases involving serious, violent crimes that have resulted in decades-long sentences for those convicted.
“To the extent that the evidence still exists and the witnesses are still around and the memory is still credible and their testimony is still competent - all of those issues will have to evaluated in the up to 1,600 cases,” he said.
He stressed that the association wasn’t taking a position in individual cases.
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