In the midst of the gloom of the coronavirus pandemic, we can at least be glad for Monday’s Supreme Court ruling that abolished the rare and unorthodox practice of split, or nonunanimous, jury verdicts. The majority opinion was supported by an interesting mixture of the court’s conservatives and liberals, as Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor formed the majority in a 6-3 decision.
The case, Ramos v. Louisiana, dealt with whether the Sixth Amendment’s requirement of unanimous jury verdicts for convictions in federal courts extends to state convictions as well. In his delivery of the majority opinion, Gorsuch described the Sixth Amendment’s requirement of a unanimous jury verdict for convictions to be “unmistakable,” and Kavanaugh lambasted the prevailing opinion that upheld split verdict convictions as “egregiously wrong.”
