Ramos v. Louisiana

Ramos v. Louisiana
Ramos v. Louisiana
	Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 7, 2019; Decided April 20, 2020
Full case name	Evangelisto Ramos, Petitioner v. Louisiana
Docket no.	18-5924
Citations	590 U.S. 83 (more) 140 S. Ct. 1390, 206 L.Ed.2d 583
Argument	Oral argument
Decision	Opinion
Case history
Prior	Defendant convicted of second-degree murder based on 10-to-2 jury verdict, sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.; Affirmed, State v. Ramos, 231 So. 3d 44 (La. Ct. App. 2017); writs denied, 257 So. 3d 679, 253 So. 3d 1300 (La. 2018).; Cert. granted, 139 S. Ct. 1318 (2019).;
Questions presented
	Whether the Fourteenth Amendment fully incorporates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of a unanimous verdict.
Holding
	The Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial—as incorporated against the States by way of the Fourteenth Amendment—requires a unanimous verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense.
Court membership
	Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito; Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan; Neil Gorsuch · Brett Kavanaugh
Case opinions
Majority	Gorsuch (Parts I, II–A, III, and IV–B–1), joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh
Plurality	Gorsuch (Parts II–B, IV–B–2, and V), joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor
Plurality	Gorsuch (Part IV–A), joined by Ginsburg, Breyer
Concurrence	Sotomayor (all but Part IV–A)
Concurrence	Kavanaugh (in part)
Concurrence	Thomas (in judgment)
Dissent	Alito, joined by Roberts; Kagan (all but Part III–D)
Laws applied
	U.S. Const. amends. VI, XIV
	This case overturned a previous ruling or rulings
	Apodaca v. Oregon (1972) (plurality opinion), Johnson v. Louisiana (1972) (Powell, J., concurring)

Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83 (2020), is a U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that guilty verdicts be unanimous in criminal trials. The decision also incorporated the Sixth Amendment requirement for unanimous jury criminal convictions against the states, and thereby overturned the Court's previous decision from the 1972 cases Apodaca v. Oregon and Johnson v. Louisiana. At the time of the decision, only Oregon and Louisiana allowed non-unanimous jury convictions, while all other states had incorporated the unanimous requirement.