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The Oregon Supreme Court last month invalidated hundreds of felony convictions obtained under a 1934 law designed to exclude people of color from meaningful participation in the justice system by allowing nonunanimous jury verdicts.

The December 30 decision in Watkins v. Ackley retroactively applies the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana, which held that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous jury verdicts in felony cases.

Ramos vacated more than 470 convictions in Oregon, the only state besides Louisiana that allowed felony convictions based on nonunanimous jury verdicts. But the Supreme Court concluded in 2021 that Ramos is not retroactively applicable in federal habeas proceedings, leaving it to the states to choose whether to apply Ramos to older cases.

Louisiana’s supreme court decided last year not to apply Ramos retroactively, denying new trials to as many as 1,500 people convicted by split juries.

After a bill that would have applied Ramos retroactively died in committee, the Oregon Supreme Court took up the question and reached the opposite conclusion in Watkins, holding that “convicting the defendant on anything less than a unanimous guilty verdict violates our sense of what is fundamentally fair in a criminal proceeding.”

Requiring all 12 jurors to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is critical to a fair trial because it reduces the risk of convicting an innocent person, the court wrote.

And jury unanimity is especially important as a safeguard against racial bias. Without it, the court said, “the majority can simply ignore the views of the minority” and “force a decision that ultimately is based on prejudice.”

The decision invalidates the split-verdict convictions of about 300 Oregonians whose appeals were final before Ramos was decided.

But as Lewis & Clark law professor Aliza Kaplan told The Oregonian, most incarcerated people do not know if they were convicted by a nonunanimous verdict because no one polled their jury and the state does not keep track of all nonunanimous verdicts. As a result, some incarcerated people may be unable to have their split-verdict convictions voided under the new ruling.
Oregon’s History of Racial Exclusion

The U.S. Supreme Court acknowledged in Ramos that Oregon voters’ adoption of a constitutional amendment in 1934 that permitted conviction by a nonunanimous jury can “be traced to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and efforts to dilute the influence of racial and ethnic and religious minorities on Oregon juries.”

Indeed, as the Watkins court explained,

Oregon discarded the common-law unanimous guilty verdict requirement—a requirement that Oregon courts had recognized and applied in criminal trials from the time Oregon’s Constitution went into effect in 1859 until the adoption of the 1934 amendment—precisely because it can prevent racial, religious, and other such majorities from overriding the views of minorities in determining guilt or innocence.

Senior Judge Richard Baldwin wrote a concurring opinion that details the discriminatory purpose and effect of Oregon’s split verdict rule because, he wrote, a commitment to the rule of law requires Oregonians “to better understand that troubled aspect of our history lest we repeat it.”

Early settlers in the region that would become Oregon generally held anti-slavery views, Judge Baldwin explained. But that did not mean they saw Black people as equals—in fact, many white settlers were opposed to living alongside Black people.

To discourage Black settlers and ensure Oregon would develop as a white state, Judge Baldwin wrote, Oregonians passed exclusion laws that barred Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon voters in 1857 approved an exclusion clause that “made Oregon the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution.”

These laws worked—by 1860, only 128 of Oregon’s 52,465 residents were Black. And their legacy remains readily apparent today—in 2013, only 2% of the state’s population was Black.

Oregon voters’ passage of the split verdict law in 1934 was a “self-inflicted injury” that evolved from the state’s racist history, Judge Baldwin wrote. For the next 90 years, it “undermined the integrity of our judicial system and reduced public confidence in our laws and our system of justice.”

Denying equal treatment under the law and full participation in the jury system to Black people not only caused great harm to people of color, Judge Baldwin observed. “That unchecked bigotry also undermined the fundamental Sixth Amendment rights of all Oregonians for nearly a century.”

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who previously opposed retroactive application of Ramos, applauded the state supreme court for “undoing a rule that should never have been enacted in the first place” and said her office is committed to enforcing the decision.

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A former sergeant with the Muncie Police Department (MPD), in Muncie, Indiana, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of obstruction of justice for writing a false report to cover up the excessive use of force by other MPD officers under his command.

According to court documents and statements made during the change of plea hearing, on or about Aug. 9, 2018, Joseph Krejsa, 52, responded to the scene of an arrest involving a civilian with the initials L.G. Before he arrived on the scene, other MPD officers under his supervision – including Officer Chase Winkle, the son of the then-Chief of Police – had used excessive force against L.G., resulting in serious injury to L.G.’s face.

The day after the arrest, Krejsa conducted a supervisory review of the incident, during which he noted that he had watched the videos of the incident and falsely deemed those uses of force “justified.”

Several days later, on or about Aug. 13 and Aug. 14, 2018, the captain of MPD’s patrol division tasked Krejsa with conducting a more in-depth review of the officers’ uses of force during L.G.’s arrest, which was separate from the typical shift sergeant review. In response to this request, Krejsa watched the involved-officers’ body worn camera videos, which revealed what had happened during the arrest: Two officers under his supervision, Chase Winkle and Corey Posey, approached L.G. in an alley way and gave several verbal commands to L.G. – including to put his hands on his head and to get on the ground – and L.G. complied with those commands.

On the ground, as Posey held both of L.G.’s hands behind his back, L.G. directed a verbal insult towards officers, and in response, Winkle, using his knee, dropped his bodyweight down onto L.G.’s neck and head area. L.G. screamed out words to the effect of, “He crushed my whole face!” and pulled his hands towards his face. Winkle then tased L.G., as other MPD officers, including Officer Jeremy Gibson, arrived to assist. Toward the end of the incident, officers secured one of L.G.’s hands in handcuffs, lifted him up to a seated position, and Gibson delivered two forceful knee strikes directly to L.G.’s face.

After reviewing the officers’ body camera videos, Krejsa knowingly authored a lengthy memorandum for MPD’s official records that contained several false statements.

Specifically, Krejsa falsely implied that any force used against L.G. was justified to ensure officer safety; falsely asserted that officers used only low levels of force near the start of the incident, and escalated to higher levels of force only after less force was ineffective; falsely stated that Winkle “kneeled on [L.G.]’s left shoulder and upper body,” when in fact Krejsa knew that Winkle had used his knee to strike L.G.’s head and neck area; and falsely implied that Winkle’s uses of force against L.G. caused only cuts to L.G.’s face, when Krejsa knew that the use of force against L.G. caused serious bodily injury to L.G.

As part of his plea, Krejsa admitted that he knew, when he wrote the false report, that the inaccuracies and material omissions in his report were intended to influence any potential investigation into the incident.

Krejsa is the fourth Muncie Police Department official to plead guilty in connection with this investigation. Krejsa was one of four MPD officers who were indicted in April 2021 in a 17-count superseding indictment for their roles in using excessive force against arrestees and/or attempting to cover up the misconduct. A fifth Muncie police officer, Dalton Kurtz, previously entered a pre-indictment guilty plea on Aug. 4, 2021, to one count of misprision of felony for concealing and failing to report inappropriate use of force by Winkle during a separate incident. 

On May 13, 2022, Gibson also pleaded guilty to civil rights and obstruction charges for assaulting a different arrestee and writing a false report about the incident. On Dec. 5, 2022, Winkle pleaded guilty to eleven counts of civil rights and obstruction offenses for assaulting arrestees and writing false reports about the incidents, including the arrest of L.G.

The last remaining officer is scheduled to stand trial at a later date.