Happy new year! Today is the 1st anniversary of Louisiana's constitutional amendment restoring the requirement that in a criminal trial, the jury be unanimous in order to deliver a verdict.
Louisiana's Amendment 2, passed in 2018, specified that in criminal trials by jury for all offenses allegedly committed on 1 January 2019 or later, the jury must be unanimous in order to deliver a verdict. The unanimity requirement is one of the things that gives a single juror the power to exercise a form of jury nullification by hanging a jury with even a lone, holdout not guilty vote.
Despite voters favoring jury unanimity by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, Amendment 2, unfortunately, provided no relief for the many convictions by split juries in cases of offenses allegedly committed prior to 2019.
The question of whether such verdicts were unconstitutional under the United States Constitution is currently under consideration by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Continuing its very thorough and award-winning reporting on jury unanimity, The Advocate has yet another informative article on the issue:
