Hundreds of Oregon criminal convictions invalidated as Supreme Court rules due to non-unanimous jury verdicts

Hundreds of felony convictions became invalid Friday after the Oregon Supreme Court struck down all nonunanimous jury verdicts reached before the practice was banned two years ago.

The retroactive ruling applies to all split-jury convictions reached during the 86-year stretch when Oregon was one of only two states, alongside Louisiana, to allow such verdicts.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Pro Tempore Richard Baldwin described the authorization of 10-2 and 11-1 jury verdicts in 1934 as a “self-inflicted injury” that was intended to minimize the voice of nonwhite jurors.

“We must understand that the passage of our non-unanimous jury-verdict law has not only caused great harm to people of color,” Baldwin wrote. “That unchecked bigotry also undermined the fundamental Sixth Amendment rights of all Oregonians for nearly a century.”

Voters approved Oregon’s nonunanimous jury system after a jury handed down a light sentence in a 1933 gangland murder trial, spurring racist and xenophobic newspaper coverage that blamed the compromise verdict on immigrant jurors, the Oregonian/OregonLive previously reported.

The U.S. Supreme Court outlawed divided verdicts in its landmark Ramos v. Louisiana decision in April 2020, but the order applied only to open cases and convictions that were actively being appealed when the ruling came down.

The ruling left the door open for states to make their own laws applying it retroactively. The Oregon Legislature did not take that action, but people convicted by split juries began pursuing a ruling at the Oregon Court of Appeals last year.

The Oregon Department of Justice says the Ramos ruling vacated more than 470 convictions with active appeals, meaning that prosecutors were required to essentially reboot each case from the beginning and either pursue a new trial, cut a plea deal or dismiss the charges.

The new state Supreme Court ruling means county district attorneys will have to make a similar decision for cases where the defendant had already exhausted a final appeal.

There are approximately 300 people, mostly in state prison, with exhausted appeals who have filed new litigation because they were convicted by a nonunanimous jury before the Ramos decision, according to Aliza Kaplan, a Lewis & Clark law professor and leader of the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic.

“I’m thrilled for the individual people who will get what all Americans deserve, which is a fair trial, but this issue is a lot bigger than any individual case,” Kaplan said. “It’s an issue about closing the book on historical wrongs that was based in racism and discrimination.”

Those with newly vacated convictions are not eligible for immediate release but will be transferred from the state Department of Corrections to county jails while local prosecutors decide how to revisit each case.

Most incarcerated people have no idea if they were convicted nonunanimously, Kaplan added, because no one polled their jury after the trial. There is no central database of older split verdicts, potentially leaving some people in prison whose convictions should be voided.

The Oregon District Attorneys Association has reacted skeptically to the ruling, arguing that the majority of cases that must be redone involve white men who were nonunanimously convicted of sex or assault crimes.

The association is calling on lawmakers to increase funding for the prosecutors and public defenders who must be mustered for “numerous” expected retrials.

“Retrying decades-old cases can be challenging, if not impossible,” the association said in an unsigned statement. “Violent offenders are the greatest beneficiaries of evidence that only degrades over time.”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum had likewise argued against a retroactive ruling when Ramos reached the U.S. Supreme Court, saying reopening old cases would re-traumatize crime victims and flood the state’s criminal justice system.

But she applauded the Oregon Supreme Court ruling on Friday, pledging that the Oregon Department of Justice would implement the new rules.

“I stand committed to eradicating inequities and ensuring fairness and impartiality in the delivery of justice in our state,” she said in a statement.

The 41-page ruling released Friday by Oregon’s top court is based on the appeal of Jacob K. Watkins, a 35-year-old Marion County man who was convicted of first-degree rape and other sex-crime charges in 2011 by a split jury. His conviction is now void.

Oregon’s split-jury law was affirmed by a much different U.S. Supreme Court in the early 1970s. State lawmakers floated a proposal ending the longstanding practice in 2019 but the measure never made it to the ballot.