WE PASSED THE AMENDMENT! YEA!
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Voting "YES" in Louisiana for Amendment 2 will require unanimous agreement of all 12 jurors to convict people charged with felonies. The current Louisiana law requires only 10 of 12 jurors to convict.
Louisiana Amendment 2, the Unanimous Jury Verdict for Felony Trials Amendment, is on the ballot in Louisiana as a legislatively referred constitutional amendment on November 6, 2018.
| A "yes" vote supports this amendment to require the unanimous agreement of jurors, rather than just 10 of 12 jurors, to convict people charged with felonies. |
A "no" vote opposes this amendment to require the unanimous agreement of jurors, rather than just 10 of 12 jurors, to convict people charged with felonies. |
Overview
Amendment 2 would require the unanimous agreement of jurors to convict people charged with felonies. As of 2018, Louisiana requires the agreement of 10 of 12, or 83 percent, jurors to convict people charged with felonies. Amendment 2 would not affect juries for offenses that were committed before January 1, 2019.[1]
As of 2018, Louisiana is one of two states—the other being Oregon—that does not require the unanimous agreement of jurors to convict people charged with felonies. Oregon does, however, require unanimous convictions in murder trials.[2][3]
In Apodaca v. Oregon (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution required unanimous juries to convict persons in federal criminal trials, but that the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend the requirement of unanimous juries to state criminal trials.[4][5]
1 comment:
Oregon is standing firm thus far, but I'm sure it's coming. It is my understanding that these laws were instituted to make it easier to convict black people, but I really don't know if this is true in Oregon, because Oregon did everything it could to keep black people out. My house was built in 1950, and the contract stated that it couldn't be resold to a black person or a Jew. Oregon cities also had sundown laws, and there was once a law that kept black people from owning land in Oregon. When that was appealed, black people were still reduced to living in places that whites didn't want to live--places prone to flooding for example. I might be telling you more than you want to know, but Oregon is an awfully big state, and the two-thirds of it that lies east of the Cascades is conservative, while the tiny Willamette Valley (45 miles x110 miles) where most of the people live--including me--is very liberal. Yet even Eugene (where I live) has a sister city called Springfield, which is fairly conservative. I suppose the difference between Oregon and most Southern states is that there is a mixture of political values here, whereas all of a state like Mississippi is conservative, with even the black voters being conservative on my things.
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