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Page Number: 15

12 

RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

Opinion of the Court 

of challenge, and other accustomed requisites. . . .”39  Loui-
siana  notes  that  the  House  of  Representatives  approved
this text with minor modifications.  Yet, the State stresses, 
the Senate replaced “impartial jury of freeholders of the vic-
inage” with “impartial jury of the State and district wherein
the crime shall have been committed” and also removed the 
explicit references to unanimity, the right of challenge, and 
“other accustomed requisites.”  In light of these revisions,
Louisiana  would  have  us  infer  an  intent  to  abandon  the 
common law’s traditional unanimity requirement. 

But  this  snippet  of  drafting  history  could  just  as  easily 
support the opposite inference.  Maybe the Senate deleted 
the language about unanimity, the right of challenge, and 
“other  accustomed  prerequisites”  because  all  this  was  so 
plainly included in the promise of a “trial by an impartial 
jury”  that  Senators  considered  the  language  surplusage.
The truth is that we have little contemporaneous evidence
shedding  light  on  why  the  Senate  acted  as  it  did.40    So  
rather than dwelling on text left on the cutting room floor, we
are much better served by interpreting the language Con-
gress retained and the States ratified.  And, as we’ve seen, 
at the time of the Amendment’s adoption, the right to a jury
trial meant a trial in which the jury renders a unanimous
verdict. 

Further  undermining  Louisiana’s  inference  about  the 
drafting history is the fact it proves too much.  If the Sen-
ate’s deletion of the word “unanimity” changed the meaning
of  the  text  that  remains,  then  the  same  would  seemingly
have to follow for the other deleted words as well.  So it’s 
not  just  unanimity  that  died  in  the  Senate,  but  all  the 

—————— 

39 1 Annals of Cong. 435 (1789). 
40 In private writings, Madison did explain some of the Senate’s objec-
tions with his original phrasing of the vicinage requirement.  See 5 Writ-
ings of James Madison 420–424 (G. Hunt ed. 1904) (letters to E. Pend-
leton,  Sept.  14  and  23,  1789).    But  this  is  little  help  in  explaining  the 
other changes made in the Senate.