Johnson v. Louisiana

Mr. Justice Marshall,

with whom Mr. Justice Brennan joins, dissenting. *

Today the Court cuts the heart out of two of the most important and inseparable safeguards the Bill of Rights offers a criminal defendant: the right to submit his case to a jury, and the right to proof beyond a reasonable *400 doubt. Together, these safeguards occupy a fundamental place in our constitutional scheme, protecting the individual defendant from the awesome power of the State. After today, the skeleton of these safeguards remains, but the Court strips them of life and of meaning. I cannot refrain from adding my protest to that of my Brothers Douglas, Brennan, and Stewart, whom I join.

In Apodaca v. Oregon, the question is too frighteningly simple to bear much discussion. We are asked to decide what is the nature of the “jury” that is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. I would have thought that history provided the appropriate guide, and as Mr. Justice Powell has demonstrated so convincingly, history compels the decision that unanimity is an essential feature of that jury. But the majority has embarked on a “functional” analysis of the jury that allows it to strip away, one by one, virtually all the characteristic features of the jury as we know it. Two years ago, over my dissent, the Court discarded as an essential feature the traditional size of the jury. Williams v. Florida, 399 U. S. 78 (1970). Today the Court discards, at least in state'trials, the traditional requirement of unanimity. It seems utterly and ominously clear that so long as the tribunal bears the label “jury,” it will meet Sixth Amendment requirements as they are presently viewed by this Court. The Court seems to require only that jurors be laymen, drawn from the community without systematic exclusion of any group, who exercise commonsense judgment.

More distressing still than the Court’s treatment of the right to jury trial is the cavalier treatment the Court gives to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The Court asserts that when a jury votes nine to three for conviction, the doubts of the three do not impeach the verdict of the nine. The argument seems to be that since, under *401 Williams , nine jurors are enough to convict, the three dissenters are mere surplusage. But there is all the difference in the world between three jurors who are not there, and three jurors who entertain doubts after hearing all the evidence. In the first case we can never know, and it is senseless to ask, whether the prosecutor might have persuaded additional jurors had they been present. But in the second case we know what has happened: the prosecutor has tried and failed to persuade those jurors of the defendant's guilt. In such circumstances, it does violence to language and to logic to say that the government has proved the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is said that this argument is fallacious because a deadlocked jury does not, under our law, bring about an acquittal or bar a retrial. The argument seems to be that if the doubt of a dissenting juror were the “reasonable doubt”- that constitutionally bars conviction, then it would necessarily result in an acquittal and bar retrial. But that argument rests on a complete non sequitur. The reasonable-doubt rule, properly viewed, simply establishes that, as a prerequisite to obtaining a valid conviction, the prosecutor must overcome all of the jury’s reasonable doubts; it does not, of itself, determine what shall happen if he fails to do so. That is a question to be answered with reference to a wholly different constitutional provision, the Fifth Amendment ban on double jeopardy, made applicable to the States through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Benton v. Maryland, 395 U. S. 784 (1969).

Under prevailing notions of double jeopardy, if a jury has tried and failed to reach a unanimous verdict, a new trial may be held. United States v. Perez, 9 Wheat. 579 (1824). The State is free, consistent with the ban on double jeopardy, to treat the verdict of a nonunanimous jury as a nullity rather than as an *402 acquittal. On retrial, the prosecutor may be given the opportunity to make a stronger case if he can: new evidence may be available, old evidence may have disappeared, and even the same evidence may appear in a different light if, for example, the demeanor of witnesses is different. Because the second trial may vary substantially from the first, the doubts of the dissenting jurors at the first trial do not necessarily impeach the verdict of a new jury on retrial. But that conclusion is wholly consistent with the view that the doubts of dissenting jurors create a constitutional bar to conviction at the trial that produced those doubts. Until today, I had thought that was the law.

I respectfully reject the suggestion of my Brother Powell that the doubts of minority jurors may be attributable to “irrationality” against which some protection is needed. For if the jury has been selected properly, and every juror is a competent and rational person, then the “irrationality” that enters into the deliberation process is precisely the essence of the right to a jury trial. Each time this Court has approved a change in the familiar characteristics of the jury, we have reaffirmed the principle that its fundamental characteristic is its capacity to render a commonsense, layman's judgment, as a representative body drawn from the community. To fence out a dissenting juror fences out a voice from the community, and undermines the principle on which our whole notion of the jury now rests. My dissenting Brothers have pointed to the danger, under a less-than-unanimous rule, of excluding from the process members of minority groups, whose participation we have elsewhere recognized as a constitutional requirement. It should be emphasized, however, that the fencing-out problem goes beyond the problem of identifiable minority groups. The juror whose dissenting voice is unheard *403 may be a spokesman, not for any minority viewpoint, but simply for himself — and that, in my view, is enough. The doubts of a single juror are in my view evidence that the government has failed to carry its burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. I dissent.

[This opinion applies also to No. 69-5046, Apodaca v. Oregon, post, p. 404.]