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RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

Syllabus 

also explained that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial is incor-
porated against the States under the Fourteenth Amendment, Duncan 
v. Louisiana, 391 U. S. 145, 148–150.  Thus, if the jury trial right re-
quires a unanimous verdict in federal court, it requires no less in state 
court.  Pp. 3–7.

(b) Louisiana’s and Oregon’s unconventional schemes were first con-
fronted in Apodaca v. Oregon, 406 U. S. 404, and Johnson v. Louisiana, 
406 U. S. 356, in a badly fractured set of opinions.  A four-Justice plu-
rality, questioning whether unanimity serves an important “function” 
in  “contemporary  society,”  concluded  that  unanimity’s  costs  out-
weighed its benefits.  Apodaca, 406 U. S., at 410.  Four dissenting Jus-
tices recognized that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimity, and 
that  the  guarantee  is  fully  applicable  against  the  States  under  the 
Fourteenth  Amendment.    The  remaining  Justice,  Justice  Powell, 
adopted  a  “dual-track”  incorporation  approach.    He  agreed  that  the 
Sixth  Amendment  requires  unanimity  but  believed  that  the  Four-
teenth  Amendment  does  not  render  this  guarantee  fully  applicable 
against  the  States—even  though  the  dual-track  incorporation  ap-
proach had been rejected by the Court nearly a decade earlier, see Mal-
loy v. Hogan, 378 U. S. 1, 10–11.  Pp. 7–9.

(c) The  best  Louisiana  can  suggest  is  that  all  of  the  Court’s  prior 
statements  that  the  Sixth  Amendment  does  require  unanimity  are
dicta.    But  the  State  offers  no  hint  as  to  why  the  Court  would  walk 
away from those statements now and does not dispute the fact that the
common  law  required  unanimity.    Instead,  it  argues  that  the  Sixth
Amendment’s drafting history—in particular, that the original House 
version’s  explicit  unanimity  references  were  removed  in  the  Senate 
version—reveals the framer’s intent to leave this particular feature of 
the common law behind.  But that piece of drafting history could just
as easily support the inference that the language was removed as sur-
plusage because the right was so plainly understood to be included in 
the right to trial by jury.  Finally, the State invites the Court to per-
form  a  cost-benefit  analysis  on  the  historic  features  of  common  law 
jury trials and to conclude that unanimity does not make the cut.  The 
dangers of that approach, however, can be seen in Apodaca, where the 
plurality subjected the ancient guarantee of a unanimous jury verdict 
to its own functionalist assessment.  Pp. 11–15.

(d) Factors traditionally considered by the Court when determining
whether  to  preserve  precedent  on  stare  decisis  grounds  do  not  favor 
upholding Apodaca.  See Franchise Tax Bd. of Cal. v. Hyatt, 587 U. S. 
___, ___.  Starting with the quality of Apodaca’s reasoning, the plural-
ity  opinion  and  separate  concurring  opinion  were  gravely  mistaken. 
And Apodaca sits uneasily with 120 years of preceding case law.  When