The Oregon Supreme Court ruled Friday that hundreds of people convicted by non-unanimous juries and still serving prison sentences in the state will be granted new trials, ending several years of legal challenges after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such sentences were unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court held in the 2020 case Ramos v. Louisiana that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial requires unanimous verdicts. At the time, Oregon and Louisiana were the only two states in the nation that allowed for split jury verdicts—vestiges of laws passed in the early 20th century with explicitly racist aims. Oregon, for example, stopped requiring unanimous verdicts in 1934 to dilute the influence of ethnic minorities on jury pools.
