Unanimity: How Many Jurors Should Agree Before a Conviction?

            One of the most important things that the Supreme Court can do is correct abuses of rights in the states. At the end of the day, legislation that is unconstitutional should be overruled so that the rights afforded to people in the Constitution can be upheld. A lot of debate has been had over what makes up a fair jury, and what any sort of margin should be in terms of a jury vote. Surprisingly, at least one jurisdiction will allow someone to be convicted of a felony without a unanimous vote. In Oregon, felony convictions can happen when nonunanimous, making them the only state in the United States to still operate in this way. But that procedure is under fire in the Supreme Court, where justices will rule on the issue hopefully once and for all. 

            There are arguments on both sides of this coin. On the one hand, a unanimous conviction is by and large the majority view for felony jury panels. And on top of that, it seems to be more in line with what the founders intended when they crafted the amendments. We make so much of a big deal about the need for fair juries made up of our peers that it seems to be missing the point when we then allow a nonunanimous jury to convict a person of a felony. The only other jurisdiction to allow for that was Louisiana, which passed a law in 2018 requiring a unanimous verdict. Advocates for this position also point out that if there is a divided jury there is at least a chance that innocent people have been locked up. And surely, a change of this magnitude would have repercussions not only for future trials in Oregon, but also in looking at past convictions. There are those who point out that it would be a lot for the appeals system to undertake should people challenge their convictions that were handed down by a divided jury, but if at least some of those people were innocent, wouldn’t it be a good thing to correct the record and allow them to continue their lives?

            There are those who are against the change. They most often point to prosecution rates as evidence that they may go down, leaving people who ought to be behind bars on the street and allowing more crime to take place. Victims’ rights groups point towards how this change would make it significantly harder to get justice for victims. Support for allowing divided juries to convict is based on a 1972 Supreme Court decision, in which they allowed divided juries on the state level, but not federal.

            But that’s a huge sticking point. If you’re the Supreme Court, it is your job to be the final resting place for debates such as this. In that 1972 opinion they say that juries must be unanimous for convictions on the federal level. They did this presumably by reading the Constitution and trying to consider what the Framers would have wanted. If their takeaway after an analysis of the Constitution is to only let unanimous juries convict, why is it ok for that to be the case on the state level. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. How is one standard upheld for the federal courts but the state courts are allowed to have a lower standard? The Supreme Court should be deciding whether the Oregon statute is constitutional soon.