SCOTUS made a ruling today that stopped two states, Louisiana and Oregon, for guilty convictions without unanimous verdicts Oregon's refusal to address this has always been a puzzler https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-ruling-lousiana-ramos_n_5e9daf40c5b63c5b5872203d
Actually, the 3 opposed were Kagan, Roberts, and Alito. A very non-partisan alignment for this decision. barfo
This means that the meth addict car thief that was convicted by a 10-2 vote by a jury I served on last year will likely get to walk on appeal. I get the reasons for requiring unanimous decisions, but I think we’d still be deliberating with that jury. Two folks just couldn’t bring themselves to vote to convict, despite the fact that photos showed the steering wheel lock that was cut off was in the car when he was busted, along with the hacksaw, and he was using a key from a Caddy in the sloppy ignition of the Impala he was driving. He also had a set of jiggle keys on him for a wide variety of older model cars. One of them was for an Impala and he claimed that was the key to the car, but he just liked using the Caddy key. Of course, when you compared the two keys it was obvious that they would not fit in the same ignition. The Impala key was clearly from a different year. There was a bunch more evidence, but the two jurors thought it was circumstantial. I don’t think you could ever convince them unless you actually caught the guy in the act of stealing the car. So, another loser will be back on the streets looking to rip off new victims.
