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By Jess Bravin and Brent Kendall 

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Monday that defendants can't be convicted of serious crimes under the Constitution unless jurors are unanimous, overturning laws in two states and calling thousands of verdicts into question.

But the court's fractured ruling has little significance for cases outside Louisiana and Oregon, the only states where a 10-2 or 11-1 jury can convict. Instead, the justices' remarks about precedent -- an issue of increasing importance, as the abortion-rights decision Roe v. Wade and other liberal landmarks face challenges -- may be the decision's most significant legacy.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote Monday's opinion, overturning a splintered 1972 decision that had left the two states' jury rules intact.

The Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial always has required unanimous verdicts, Justice Gorsuch wrote, a principle tracing back through centuries of English law and recognized explicitly by the Supreme Court in the 19th century. Such was the case in Louisiana as well until the state's Jim Crow constitution of 1898. It adopted the 10-2 jury to prevent the occasional African-American who made it onto a jury from interfering with a white majority determined to convict, the court observed.

The court rejected a challenge to that practice in the 1972 case, Apodaca v. Oregon, with a plurality opinion finding no constitutional problem with a nonunanimous jury. To overrule that case, Justice Gorsuch rejected the reasoning of his mentor who wrote the decision, the late Byron White.

Justice White had argued that an "impartial jury" existed, in the modern era, to "safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge." That could be something that could be accomplished with a 10-2 vote as well as a unanimous one, he wrote.

Justice Gorsuch wrote that since the framers understood verdicts to require unanimity, "as judges, it is not our role to reassess" the wisdom of that choice. "With humility, we must accept that this right may serve purposes evading our current notice," he wrote.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Brett Kavanaugh joined all or part of the Gorsuch opinion, while Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome through a different legal framework.

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined in whole or part by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan. Justice Alito wrote that the racist and nativist motivations that led to the initial adoption of the jury rules were irrelevant, since they were readopted through processes that weren't similarly tainted.

Moreover, he warned, the past 48 years have seen Louisiana and Oregon conduct "thousands and thousands of trials under rules allowing non-unanimous verdicts. Now, those States face a potential tsunami of litigation on the jury-unanimity issue" and when it should apply retroactively to existing convictions.

Still, both Louisiana and Oregon already have been moving away from the nonunanimous-jury rule. Louisiana voters abolished it for future cases, while Oregon is expected to amend its constitution to the same end, according to a brief from that state.

The most significant aspects of the decision, therefore, may turn out to be the implications for the weight the court ascribes to precedent in future cases.

Justice Kavanaugh has wrestled with that issue before and on Monday published a three-part test for evaluating when prior cases should be overturned.

To do so, he wrote, the precedent must be "egregiously wrong," should have "significant negative jurisprudential or real-world consequences" and shouldn't "unduly upset reliance interests" -- or the behavior of individuals, businesses and others based on the expectation that the precedent accurately describes the law.

The immediate victor in Monday's case was Evangelisto Ramos, who was sent to prison without possibility of parole after a 10-2 jury convicted him of the 2014 stabbing murder of Trinece Fedison, with whom prosecutors said he had been "sexually involved."

"We are heartened that the Court has held, once and for all, that the promise of the Sixth Amendment fully applies in Louisiana, rejecting any concept of second-class justice," said Ben Cohen, an attorney for Mr. Ramos and with the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans nonprofit.

"Louisiana's law was based upon a previous Supreme Court ruling that allowed for non-unanimous juries," the Louisiana attorney general's office said. "Our law has since been changed and the Supreme Court has now issued this new ruling, yet our focus remains the same: to uphold the rule of law and protect victims of crime."

In a separate decision Monday, the court addressed the cleanup of hazardous waste sites, limiting the ability of landowners to use private ligation to force restoration measures beyond those required by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The case dates from 2008, when a group of 98 Montana property owners sued Atlantic Richfield Co., a BP PLC subsidiary. The landowners alleged the company needed to do more than the federal government required to remediate arsenic and lead pollution in lands surrounding a copper smelting operation near Butte.

The EPA, under the federal Superfund law, has been managing cleanup of the site for 35 years, and Atlantic Richfield has spent roughly $450 million so far implementing the agency's orders.

The landowners filed suit in state court to seek roughly $50 million more for property restoration. The high court, in a 7-2 opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, didn't entirely foreclose such lawsuits but said landowners need EPA's blessing first.

The plaintiffs don't have EPA's approval, and the government has said the landowners' plans could interfere with its cleanup, including by digging up contaminated soil that has been protectively capped in place.

Chief Justice Roberts took issue with the landowners' claim that requiring EPA approval would mean they'd need a nod from the feds even to dig out part of their backyards to make a sandbox for grandchildren.

"The grandchildren of Montana can rest easy," the chief justice wrote.

In dissent, Justice Gorsuch accused the court of stripping rights from landowners and forcing them to live with toxic waste.

"The implication here is that property owners cannot be trusted to clean up their lands without causing trouble," Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, wrote.

Write to Jess Bravin at jess.bravin@wsj.com and Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 20, 2020 18:20 ET (22:20 GMT)

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