Ramos v. Louisiana (18-5924)

argument 18-5924

Ramos v. Louisiana

Supreme Court of the United States 1h 1m 6 speakers 8 chapters transcribed 6 days ago official recording ↗

▲ 0

Transcript

jump: chapters · speakers · find in transcript

Transcript

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

What is the central constitutional question in Ramos v. Louisiana?

John G. Roberts 0:00

We'll hear argument next in case eighteen fifty nine twenty four. Ramos versus Louisiana. Mr. Fisher.

William A. Fisher 0:09

Mr. Chief Justice, I may it please the court. Last term in Tim's Against Indiana, this court reaffirmed the well-settled rule that incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights apply the same way to the states as they apply to the federal government. Taking that rule as the given, the state does not defend Justice Powell's pivotal vote in the Apadaka case. And indeed, that reasoning flouted precedent at the time. and has since been relegated to nothing more than an isolated relic of an abandoned doctrine. The state's only defense in support of the judgment below is that the Sixth Amendment does not require unanimity at all. That is, not in state courts or in federal courts. This court should reject that argument.

William A. Fisher 0:50

As the court has said many times over many decades, the Sixth Amendment requires a unanimous verdict to convict. In particular, what the court has said is that the Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury carries with it the essentials of the common law. And the common law authorities are uniform, explicit, and absolute. Unanimity is an absolute requirement to trial by jury. And the reasons that the U common law commentators gave for that rule are this are resonate just as powerfully now as they did then. In a nutshell, we are not prepared to take away somebody's liberty unless a cross-section of the community uniformly agrees that criminal punishment is appropriate. Now, I don't think the state disputes that historical account that I just gave you, or even that.

William A. Fisher 1:33

Unanimity is central to the proper functioning of the jury trial right. Instead, what the state says are two primary things. First, that the drafting history of the Sixth Amendment suggests that the framers meant to dispense with that historical rule. And second, that that historical requirement of unanimity is no more important than the 12-person rule, which this court said is not part of the Sixth Amendment in Williams. So let me turn to those two arguments. Let me start with the drafting history. And we think for three reasons the state has overread the drafting history. First, as the Court itself has said in cases dealing with provisions like the Second Amendment and the Double Jeopardy Clause, We do not read into a deletion of language any meaning when there's no contemporary evidence that it was designed to change the meaning of the provision.

William A. Fisher 2:18

And that's all the more true here because of the contextual backdrop. The state talks about the fact that many states at the time had trial by jury provisions in their own constitutions and correctly notes that some of those provisions explicitly required unanimity, but some of them didn't. didn't. And the rule was the same across all of those states. So the thing that the framers would have taken from the context at the time. would have been that it doesn't matter whether you have unanimity in the provision. It requires it either way.

John G. Roberts 2:46

Well but still that I mean To give them uh To be fair, even if you see some have unanimity, some don't, and you've got a draft that says unanimity, I don't understand why you would take it out and just then be able to argue later, well, it doesn't matter whether it was in or not. It's in there in the draft. Why would they take it out?

William A. Fisher 3:04

But well the best historical evidence, Mr. Chief Justice, is that it was uh it got latched on to a debate about the vicinage requirement. And so what James Madison did is take away all of the elaboration of the of the right to trial by jury. And so I think actually the best example also to respond is p is Philad is the uh Pennsylvania Constitution. Which at the time of the founding required unanimity explicitly. And then Justice Wilson actually amended the uh rewrote the Constitution in in Pennsylvania to take it out. And remember, Justice Wilson, as we note at length in our brief, was one of the leading expositors of the common law notion of trial by jury and the Sixth Amendment requiring unanimity.

William A. Fisher 3:42

And I think that was the last thing I wanted to say about the drafting history.