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14 

RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

Opinion of the Court 

their  peculiar  rules  in  the  first  place.44   What’s  more,  the 
plurality never explained why the promised benefit of aban-
doning  unanimity—reducing  the  rate  of  hung  juries—al-
ways scores as a credit, not a cost.  But who can say whether
any particular hung jury is a waste, rather than an example 
of a jury doing exactly what the plurality said it should—
deliberating  carefully  and  safeguarding  against  overzeal-
ous prosecutions?  And what about the fact, too, that some 
studies suggest that the elimination of unanimity has only 
a small effect on the rate of hung juries?45  Or the fact that 
others profess to have found that requiring unanimity may
provide  other  possible  benefits,  including  more  open-
minded  and  more  thorough  deliberations?46    It  seems  
the  Apodaca  plurality  never  even  conceived  of  such
possibilities.

Our real objection here isn’t that the Apodaca plurality’s
cost-benefit analysis was too skimpy.  The deeper problem 

—————— 

44 The dissent chides us for acknowledging the racist history of Louisi-
ana’s and Oregon’s laws, and commends the Apodaca plurality’s decision 
to disregard these facts.  Post, at 2–5, 14.  But if the Sixth Amendment 
calls on judges to assess the functional benefits of jury rules, as the Apo-
daca  plurality  suggested,  how  can  that  analysis  proceed  to  ignore  the 
very functions those rules were adopted to serve?  The dissent answers 
that  Louisiana  and  Oregon  eventually  recodified  their  nonunanimous 
jury laws in new proceedings untainted by racism.  See post, at 3–4, n. 3. 
But  that  cannot  explain  Apodaca’s  omission:    The  States’  proceedings 
took place only after the Court’s decision.  Nor can our shared respect for 
“rational and civil discourse,” post, at 5, supply an excuse for leaving an 
uncomfortable  past  unexamined.  Still,  the  dissent  is  right  about  one 
thing—a jurisdiction adopting a nonunanimous jury rule even for benign
reasons would still violate the Sixth Amendment. 

45 See H. Kalven & H. Zeisel, The American Jury 461 (1966); Diamond, 
Rose, & Murphy, Revisiting the Unanimity Requirement:  The Behavior 
of the Nonunanimous Civil Jury, 100 Nw. U. L. Rev. 201, 207–208 (2006). 
46 Devine et al., Jury Decision Making:  45 Years of Empirical Research
on Deliberating Groups, 7 Psych. Pub. Pol’y & L. 622, 669 (2001); R. Has-
tie,  S.  Penrod,  &  N.  Pennington,  Inside  the  Jury  115,  164–165  (1983); 
Hans, The Power of Twelve:  The Impact of Jury Size and Unanimity on
Civil Jury Decision Making, 4 Del. L. Rev. 1, 24–25 (2001).