Inspiration behind APPEAL’s research into majority jury verdicts: the USA campaign
Until APPEAL’s ground breaking report Doubt Dismissed, published in May 2023, the origins of majority verdicts in England and Wales had not previously been subject to academic study.
However, their origins in the USA had been scrupulously researched. Behind the movement that ended Louisiana’s use of non-unanimous jury verdicts was vital research undertaken by Professor Angela Allen-Bell of Southern University and others. Professor Allen-Bell worked alongside Calvin Duncan, who spent more than 28 years wrongfully imprisoned and helped draft the submission for the 2020 Ramos v Louisiana case, which abolished majority verdicts in serious cases.
Majority verdicts were introduced during Louisiana’s 1898 constitutional convention, the purpose of which was to consider voting rights.[i] Archival research which explored commentary from the convention demonstrated how the adoption of majority verdicts in Louisiana was racially motivated.[ii] First, majority verdicts meant that Black jurors could not use their new voting powers to attempt to prevent the conviction of Black defendants.[iii] Second, majority verdicts allowed for quicker convictions, facilitating a production line of free prison labour – a replacement for slave labour.[iv]
The 1898 convention had an overt mission to maintain white supremacy in Louisiana following the abolition of slavery. Recently emancipated Black people were freed from slavery and given new rights, including joining the jury pool. Many white Southerners therefore agreed that ‘the jury system must be radically changed if the negroes are to continue as jurymen’.[v] Black people were depicted by the media as ‘ignorant of the responsibilities of jurors, unable to discriminate between truth and falsehood in testimony’ and easily ‘corrupted by bribes’.[vi] They were perceived to ‘dilute’ jury pools, help Black defendants avoid punishment,[vii] and show defendants undue leniency. Fears about ‘negro domination’ and ‘white disenfranchisement’ were widespread, as Louisianans were concerned that white people would not receive a fair trial if ‘Negro jurors were impanelled’.[viii] Majority verdicts in Oregon, introduced in 1934, have similarly been traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to ‘dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries’.[ix] Allowing convictions based on split verdicts was a form of Jim Crow-era law-making that allowed states to side line the voices of minority jurors.
Various Southern laws were devised to criminalise Black life after slavery, including by capitalising on prison labour through convict leasing, a system of forced penal labour. In this period, the proportion of Black prisoners increased from less than 1% to 90% in some states, creating a racial caste system resembling slavery for a predominantly Black prison population.[x] Abolishing unanimity was therefore seen as a way of preventing Black people from blocking convictions, ensuring a burgeoning and ready supply of free prison labour.
These archival findings were submitted as evidence in the Ramos v Louisiana case. While the context in which majority verdicts were introduced in England and Wales differs significantly from that of Louisiana, the practice was similarly introduced during a time of anti-racist struggle, and where the rights of negatively racialised people consumed public and political debate.
Inspired by Evangelisto, Calvin and Angela’s research and campaigning, and concerned by the startling discovery of the racist origins of majority verdicts in the USA, APPEAL set out to uncover why such a radical change in juror decision-making was made in England and Wales, to examine if racism played a role and to unearth any possible links to miscarriages of justice.
To read more about APPEAL’s research on majority verdicts in England and Wales, click here.
[i] Majority verdicts were originally introduced in Louisiana in 1880, whereby a majority of 9
out of 12 jurors was required. Majority verdicts made their way to the Constitution of 1889 by
way of Article 116, amended to a majority of 10 out of 12 jurors.
[ii] T. Frampton, ‘The Jim Crow jury’, Vanderbilt Law Review 71, no. 5 (2018): pp. 1593–1654
[iii] A. Allen-Bell, ‘These jury systems are vestiges of white supremacy’, The Washington Post, 22
September 2017, available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/these-jury-sys-
tems-are-vestiges-of-white-supremacy/2017/09/22/d7f1897a-9f13-11e7-9c8d-cf053ff30921_
story.html.
[iv] Ibid
[v] Quoted in Frampton, ‘The Jim Crow jury’, p. 1614.
[vi] New Orleans Daily Picayune 1870, cited in Allen-Bell, ‘How the narrative about Louisiana’s
non-unanimous criminal jury system became a person of interest’, p. 597.
[vii] T. Aiello, ‘Non-unanimous juries: a segregation-era law voted down in 2018 and deemed
unconstitutional in 2020’, 64 Parishes, 15 November 2021, available at https://64parishes.
Org/entry/non-unanimous-juries.
[viii] Quoted in Frampton, ‘The Jim Crow jury’, p. 1600
[ix] A. Kaplan, ‘Non-unanimous jury law in Oregon’, Oregon Encyclopedia, 19 April 2023, avail-
able at https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/non_unanimous_jury_law/.
[x] T. Aiello, Jim Crow’s Last Stand: non-unanimous criminal jury verdicts in Louisiana (Louisiana:
LSU Press, 2019).
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