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SCOTUS wastes no time taking up new case to address whether new Ramos jury unanimity rule is retroactive

By Douglas Berman

In the US Supreme Court’s Sixth Amendment unanimous jury ruling a couple of weeks ago, Ramos v. Louisiana, No. 18–5924 (S. Ct. April 20, 2020) (available here, basics here), a couple of the Justices already started debating whether the ruling would be give retroactive effect.  Interestingly, this new SCOTUS order list includes this new certiorari grant revealing that the Justices were eager to formally take up this issue before lower courts even had a chance to try to hash it out:

EDWARDS, THEDRICK V. VANNOY, WARDEN

The motion of petitioner for leave to proceed in forma pauperis is granted, and the petition for a writ of certiorari is granted limited to the following question: Whether this Court’s decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___ (2020), applies retroactively to cases on federal collateral review.

Long-time readers should know that I generally view getting matters “right” in the criminal justice system as much more important than keeping that which is wrong “final.”  (This is especially true  in the sentencing area as I explained in “Re-Balancing Fitness, Fairness, and Finality for Sentences” a few years ago.)  I always believe it especially important for new substantive laws and rules to be retroactive, and Ramos is obviously “just” a procedural rule.  But I have long hoped that the Supreme Court’s Teague doctrine for limiting the retroactivity of procedural rules would someday identify the long-discussed “watershed” procedural rule that implicates the fundamental fairness and accuracy of the trial and thus should be fully retroactive.  See 489 U. S. 288, 311-312 (1989) (plurality opinion).  I suspect and hope jury unanimity might prove to be just such a rule (though I am certainly not holding my breath in light of the opinions in Ramos).

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