Juries: is almost unanimous good enough? In Oregon and Louisiana, a 10-2 vote can convict or acquit.

• Author: Liptak, Adam
• Position: LAW

Twelve Angry Men, a play that's performed in hundreds of high schools across the country, might have been much shorter had it been set in Oregon. instead of letting Juror No. 8, played by Henry Fonda in the movie version, convince them that there was reason to doubt the defendant's guilt, Oregon jurors might have just voted and been done with it.

That's because Oregon is one of only two states that doesn't require juries to reach unanimous verdicts in criminal cases. Like Louisiana, it arrows conviction or acquittal, by a vote of 10 to 2.

[Oregon requires a unanimous vote in first-degree murder cases, and Louisiana requires it in cases involving the death penalty.)

In a pair of 1972 decisions from Louisiana and Oregon, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution doesn't require jury unanimity. But this year, Scott D. Bowen, an Oregon man sentenced to 17 years in prison for sexual assault--after a jury voted 10 to 2 to convict him-challenged the constitutionality of the verdict and his lawyers appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees "the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial. jury." The men who drafted it understood convictions to require, as the English judge William Blackstone put it in 1769, "the unanimous suffrage of 12" of the defendant's "'equals and neighbors."

In a brief urging the Supreme Court not to hear Bowen's case, Oregon acknowledged that "the common law at the time of the founding required a jury verdict to be unanimous.... But it does not follow from that historical, fact that a unanimous jury became a constitutional. guarantee."

FEWER HUNG JURIES?

Joshua Marquis, an Oregon district attorney, says requiring agreement among just 10 jurors is efficient. "Pretty...