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16 

RAMOS v. LOUISIANA 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

the features that  were absorbed.   On the question of jury 
service by women, the majority’s only answer, buried in a 
footnote,  is  that  the  exclusion  of  women  was  outlawed  by 
“further constitutional amendments,” ante, at 15, n. 47, pre-
sumably  the  Fourteenth  Amendment.  Does  that  mean 
that  the  majority  disagrees  with  the  holding  in  Taylor  v. 
Louisiana,  419  U. S.  522  (1975)—another  opinion  by
Justice White—that the exclusion of women from jury ser-
vice violates the Sixth Amendment?  Id., at 531, 533–536.26 
Fifth, it is not accurate to say that Justice White based
his  conclusion  on  a  cost-benefit  analysis  of  requiring  jury
unanimity.  His point, rather, was that what the Court had
already identified as the fundamental purpose of the jury-
trial right was not undermined by allowing a verdict of 11 
to 1 or 10 to 2. 

I cannot say that I would have agreed either with Justice
White’s analysis or his bottom line in Apodaca if I had sat 
on the Court at that time, but the majority’s harsh criticism
of his opinion is unwarranted. 

—————— 

26 The  majority  also  notes  that  the  Judiciary  Act  of  1789  pegged  the 
qualifications for service on federal juries to those used in the State in
which  a  case  was  tried,  ante,  at  15,  n.  47,  but  since  all  States  barred 
women, see Taylor, 419 U. S., at 536, it is hard to see how the 1789 Act 
can provide a ground for distinguishing the common law’s requirement
of unanimity from its insistence that women were not fit to serve. 

Jury practice at the time of the founding differed from current prac- 
tice  in  other  important  respects.  Jurors  were  not  selected  at  random. 
“[P]ublic  officials  called  selectmen,  supervisors,  trustees,  or  ‘sheriffs  of
the  parish’  exercised  what  Tocqueville  called  ‘very  extensive  and  very 
arbitrary’ powers in summoning jurors.”  Alschuler & Deiss, A Brief His-
tory of the Criminal Jury in the United States, 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 867, 
879–880 (1994).  And “American trial judges . . . routinely summarized 
the evidence for jurors and often told jurors which witnesses they found 
most  credible,  and  why.”    Sklansky,  Evidentiary  Instructions  and  the 
Jury as Other, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 407, 454 (2013).  Any attempt to identify
the aspects of late 18th-century practice that were incorporated into the 
Sixth Amendment should take the full picture into account and provide 
a principle for the distinction.