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6 

RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

Opinion of the Court 

any meaning at all, it surely included a requirement as long
and widely accepted as unanimity. 

Influential,  postadoption  treatises  confirm  this  under-
standing.  For example, in 1824, Nathan Dane reported as 
fact that the U. S. Constitution required unanimity in crim-
inal jury trials for serious offenses.16  A few years later, Jus-
tice Story explained in his Commentaries on the Constitu-
tion  that  “in  common  cases,  the  law  not  only  presumes
every man innocent, until he is proved guilty; but unanim-
ity  in  the  verdict  of  the  jury  is  indispensable.”17  Similar 
statements  can  be  found  in  American  legal  treatises 
throughout the 19th century.18 

Nor is this a case where the original public meaning was
lost to time and only  recently recovered.  This Court has, 
repeatedly and over many years, recognized that the Sixth 
Amendment  requires  unanimity.    As  early  as  1898,  the 
Court said that a defendant enjoys a “constitutional right 
to  demand  that  his  liberty  should  not  be  taken  from  him
except by the joint action of the court and the unanimous
verdict of a jury of twelve persons.”19  A few decades later, 
the Court elaborated that the Sixth Amendment affords a 
right to “a trial by jury as understood and applied at com-
mon law, . . . includ[ing] all the essential elements as they 
were recognized in this country and England when the Con-
stitution  was  adopted.”20    And,  the  Court  observed,  this 

—————— 

16 6 N. Dane, Digest of American Law, ch. LXXXII, Art. 2, §1, p. 226 

(1824). 

17 2 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States 

§777, p. 248 (1833). 

18 See, e.g., J. Pomeroy, An Introduction to Municipal Law §135, p. 78 
(1864);  J.  Tiffany,  Government  and  Constitutional  Law  §549,  p.  367
(1867);  T.  Cooley,  Constitutional  Limitations  319–320  (1868);  1  J. 
Bishop, Criminal Procedure §897 (rev. 2d ed. 1872). 

19 Thompson v. Utah, 170 U. S. 343, 351 (1898).  See also Maxwell v. 

Dow, 176 U. S. 581, 586 (1900). 

20 Patton v. United States, 281 U. S. 276, 288 (1930).