http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-jury28-2008oct28,0,5088949.story
In the 1957 movie “12 Angry Men,” Henry Fonda portrayed the lone holdout on a jury charged with deciding whether a young Latino man had stabbed his father to death. Eventually, the Fonda character convinces his fellow jurors that there is reasonable doubt of the young man's guilt, and the jury acquits him. The film was a fictionalized -- even romanticized -- depiction of one of the hallmarks of the U.S. legal system: that a defendant must be convicted by a unanimous jury of his peers.
To its discredit, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Louisiana to chip away at that bedrock by allowing a murder defendant to be convicted by a non-unanimous jury. The justices turned away an appeal from Derrick Todd Lee, who was found guilty of second-degree murder. Along with Oregon, Louisiana allows non-unanimous criminal verdicts -- a departure from an almost universal rule rooted in history and good sense.
In the 1957 movie “12 Angry Men,” Henry Fonda portrayed the lone holdout on a jury charged with deciding whether a young Latino man had stabbed his father to death. Eventually, the Fonda character convinces his fellow jurors that there is reasonable doubt of the young man's guilt, and the jury acquits him. The film was a fictionalized -- even romanticized -- depiction of one of the hallmarks of the U.S. legal system: that a defendant must be convicted by a unanimous jury of his peers.
To its discredit, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed Louisiana to chip away at that bedrock by allowing a murder defendant to be convicted by a non-unanimous jury. The justices turned away an appeal from Derrick Todd Lee, who was found guilty of second-degree murder. Along with Oregon, Louisiana allows non-unanimous criminal verdicts -- a departure from an almost universal rule rooted in history and good sense.
