Racism corrected: Oregon court voids hundreds of split jury convictions

[ihaveaquestion]

Oregon court voids convictions

Reverses an explicitly racist judicial practice:

Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states ever to adopt split juries in America, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed for both states in a 1972 decision that the court jettisoned in 2020. In the latter decision, the court ruled 6-3 that American juries were always meant to be unanimous.

But in Oregon on Friday, retiring Chief Justice Thomas Balmer took a different view. He traced the adoption of split jury rules in 1934 to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in that state, and “efforts to dilute the influence of race and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries.”

“We conclude that, when a criminal defendant’s guilt or innocence is determined by means of a trial before a 12-person jury, convicting the defendant on anything less than a unanimous guilty verdict violates our sense of what is fundamentally fair in a criminal proceeding,” Balmer wrote.

Oregon is currently one of the most progressive US states, but it's history is still in line with the US history of racism. Thank goodness there are still people willing to make corrections to historical injustices.

Thank you Oregon Supreme Court!