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By The Vanguard Staff
NEW ORLEANS, LA – Evangelisto Ramos was free here after a 2020 “landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision,” according to the Associated Press, found “nonunanimous jury convictions as unconstitutional, with justices on the 6-3 majority acknowledging the practice as a vestige of racism from the era of ‘Jim Crow’ laws enforcing racial segregation.”
But Ramos—who had faced a life sentence on a 10-2 jury vote but in March walked after a unanimous jury found him not guilty—is one of the lucky ones, with more than 1,000 others serving sentences after nonunanimous jury votes.
“I knew my case was important because a lot of people were going to get their freedom back,” Ramos, a Black immigrant from Honduras, told The Associated Press, answering emailed questions about his time in prison and his pursuit of a new trial.
But, added AP, “prospects for freedom remain murky for hundreds of people convicted on 10-2 or 11-1 jury votes whose appeals were exhausted before the Ramos case was decided. The advocacy group Promise of Justice Initiative estimates there are more than 1,500 such people locked up in Louisiana.”
“In Oregon, the only other state that allowed nonunanimous verdicts for convictions before the Ramos case, the state Supreme Court granted new trials. But the U.S. Supreme Court and the Louisiana Supreme Court rejected arguments to apply the ruling retroactively,” the AP story reads.
Louisiana advocates have failed to get the state lawmakers to pass a new law to end the practice, and the proposal drew “criticism from some prosecutors who didn’t want to revisit old cases, as well as advocates for people it was meant to benefit,” said AP.
“Instead of retroactively granting new trials, the legislation would establish a commission with three retired state appellate or Supreme Court judges empowered to decide whether the verdict ‘resulted in a miscarriage of justice,’ and whether parole is warranted,” AP said.
“Even the compromise failed to win over some state prosecutors, according to Loren Lampert, director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, which was officially neutral on the bill. Meanwhile, criminal justice advocates were unhappy with the compromise measure’s lack of a path for exoneration,” the AP story said.
“It has to be true relief—release from being considered guilty,” said Hardell Ward, a Promise of Justice Initiative attorney whose client’s case led to a state high court ruling barring older, appeal-exhausted convictions from the ban on nonunanimous verdicts.
“Ramos was arrested in 2014 and tried on a second-degree murder charge in the stabbing death of a woman found in a trash can outside her home. All but two jurors found him guilty in 2016. Retrial defense attorneys noted DNA from two people, neither of them Ramos, was found under the victim’s fingernails. There was no blood recovered from the floor of Ramos’ apartment, where prosecutors argued she was killed,” AP explained.
“You can’t overstate the significance of what this verdict signals about how deeply problematic these nonunanimous juries were,” said Sarah Chervinsky, one of Ramos’ retrial lawyers, about “nonunanimous jury policies that were rooted in post-Civil War policy and designed to make conviction of Black defendants easier, even with one or two Black jurors,” AP added.
AP added that, “In 2018, Louisiana voters prohibited nonunanimous verdicts for crimes committed after Jan. 1, 2019. The vote followed a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of stories in The Advocate analyzing the law’s racist origins and the racial disparities in verdicts.
“The 2020 Ramos decision affected active cases even for crimes committed before 2019. But progress stalled when the high courts refused to make the Ramos decision retroactive.”
The Associated Press noted, “Some prosecutors have taken it upon themselves to review cases involving Jim Crow verdicts. Jason Williams established a civil rights division when he took over New Orleans’ district attorney’s office in 2021 on a reform platform. His office says more than 100 of an estimated 230 such cases have been reviewed. Cases were dismissed against 10 wrongfully convicted people and dozens of sentences or charges have been reduced.”
“It is not a technicality, it is not an insignificant difference, when the prosecutor has to convince all 12 people to unanimously agree on a verdict,” Chervinsky said. “That encourages more vigorous debate and discussion. It requires them to really take into account all of the potential reasonable doubt in the case in a way that I think jurors can ignore if they’re permitted to ignore the voices of two people in that room.”
