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Page Number: 65.0

4 

RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

that is undeniably false.3 

Some  years  ago  the  British  Parliament  enacted  a  law
allowing non-unanimous verdicts.4  Was Parliament under 
the sway of the Klan?  The Constitution of Puerto Rico per-
mits  non-unanimous  verdicts.5   Were  the  framers  of  that 
Constitution  racists?  Non-unanimous  verdicts  were  once 
advocated by the American Law Institute and the American
Bar Association.6  Was their aim to promote white suprem-
acy?  And  how  about  the  prominent  scholars  who  have
taken the same position?7  Racists all?  Of course not.  So 
all the talk about the Klan, etc., is entirely out of place.8  We 

—————— 

3 Among other things, allowing non-unanimous verdicts prevents mis-
trials caused by a single rogue juror, that is, a juror who refuses to pay
attention at trial, expressly defies the law, or spurns deliberation.  When 
unanimity  is  demanded,  the  work  of  preventing  this  must  be  done  in 
large  measure  by  more  intensive  voir  dire  and  more  aggressive  use  of
challenges for cause and peremptory challenges.  See Amar, Reinventing
Juries:  Ten  Suggested  Reforms,  28  U.  C.  D.  L.  Rev.  1169,  1189–1191
(1995). 

4 Juries Act 1974, ch. 23, §17 (replacing Criminal Justice Act 1967, ch. 
80,  §13).  See  Lloyd-Bostock  &  Thomas,  Decline  of  the  “Little  Parlia-
ment”:  Juries  and  Jury  Reform  in  England  and  Wales,  62 Law & Con-
temp. Prob. 7, 36 (Spring 1999); see also Leib, A Comparison of Criminal
Jury Decision Rules in Democratic Countries, 5 Ohio St. J. Crim. L. 629, 
642 (2008). 

5 P. R. Const., Art. II, § 11 (establishing “verdict by a majority vote” of 

at least 9 of 12 jurors). 

6 ALI, Code of Criminal Procedure §355 (1930); id., Comment, at 1027; 
ABA  Project  on  Standards  for  Criminal  Justice  Compilation,  Trial  by
Jury 318 (1974). 

7 See,  e.g.,  Amar,  supra,  at  1189–1191;  Holland,  Improving  Criminal 
Jury Verdicts: Learning From the Court-Martial, 97 J. Crim. L. & C. 101, 
125–141 (2006); Leib, Supermajoritarianism and the American Criminal
Jury, 33 Hastings Const. L. Q. 141, 142 (2006). 

8 The majority’s defense of its reliance on the original reasons for the 
adoption of the Louisiana and Oregon rules is incoherent.  On the one 
hand,  it  asks:  “[I]f  the  Sixth  Amendment  calls  on  judges  to  assess  the 
functional benefits of jury rules, as the Apodaca plurality suggested, how 
can that analysis proceed to ignore the very functions those rules were