NEW ORLEANS – National Urban League President and CEO Marc H. Morial and Judy Reese Morse, President and CEO of the Urban League of Louisiana today denounce Louisiana’s unjust and discriminatory jury law and urge Louisianans to vote yes on the upcoming ballot question to bring the state in line with most of the rest of the country.
“The law was a blatantly racist attempt to deny Black citizens a voice in the justice system and 120 years later it is no less discriminatory,” Morial said. “It a blight on this great state, and it’s time to renounce everything it represents.”
Only two states in the entire country -- Louisiana and Oregon -- allow a non-unanimous jury verdict to convict a defendant of a serious crime, and no state but Louisiana allows it for murder. A question on the ballot this Nov. 6 would ask voters whether to change the law.
“As far as juries are concerned, Louisiana still is living under Jim Crow,” Morse said. “Louisiana has one of the most racially-discriminatory criminal justice systems in the nation, and the jury law is a big reason why.” Roughly a third of Louisianans are Black, but two-thirds of state prisoners and three-fourths of inmates serving life without parole are Black, she said.
Following the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision allowing state-sponsored racial segregation, drafters of the 1898 Louisiana state constitution aimed to “perpetuate the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race in Louisiana,” eliminating nearly all 130,000 Black registered voters from the rolls.
“By law, they couldn’t outright ban Black citizens from voting or serving on juries, so they devised a system that would invalidate the votes of the few African Americans who might make it on to a jury,” Morial said.
An analysis of convictions by The Advocate found that Black defendants are 30% more likely to be convicted by non-unanimous verdicts. Louisiana is second in the nation in wrongful convictions; Innocence Project-New Orleans found that 11 of 25 wrongful convictions resulted from a non-unanimous verdicts.
Both the Louisiana State Bar Association and the American Bar Association have adopted resolutions in April 2018 urging Louisiana and Oregon require unanimous verdicts.
CONTACT: Teresa Candori
212-558-5362 | tcandori@nul.org
Cathy Washington
504-620-2332 | cwashington@urbanleaguela.org
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