11 to 1

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0:54Get your mother-loving ears on because your big-time radio DJ's got news. PayPal lets you choose how you want to pay for all the stuff. With PayPal, I can pay in-store, pay online, or pay over time. What's that? You want this translated into song? I hope you're sitting down. You can pay your own way. You keep those ears on, you hear? Don't just pay, baby. PayPal. Learn more at PayPal.com. The first time that we voted, it was 10 saying guilty and 2 saying not guilty. But whenever we took a repoll, it went to 11 to 1. John R. Taylor was the one, the only person who didn't vote guilty on all charges in a criminal trial in Louisiana in 2007.

1:47The person on trial was a teenager named Thedric Edwards. What did the prosecution say he had done? The prosecution stated that he had been involved with, they refer to it as like a crime spree, basically like a weekend of robbing people. One weekend in May 2006, two people kidnapped a college student at gunpoint and tried to withdraw money from his bank account. When that didn't work, they went to steal from his apartment, in the apartment of his girlfriend while she was home. They raped her and another woman in the apartment. There were other robberies that weekend. At least one other person was held at gunpoint and taken to an ATM to withdraw cash.

2:36The police started investigating some of Thedrick Edwards' friends. The police recovered security footage from a bowling alley that showed Thedrick Edwards at a graduation party for the whole 12th grade class, socializing with three other teenagers they'd arrested. He was slated to graduate that year also, but he was an honor student. He was supposed to go to Southern University and enroll in their engineering program. The first kidnapping victim picked two people out of a suspect lineup. One was Thedrick Edwards. But the other person he picked was a, quote, filler, someone who definitely hadn't been there.

3:19Fedrick Edwards confessed to committing the crimes on video, but later he testified that he was threatened and physically intimidated by the police, that he didn't have a choice. John Reed Taylor remembers hearing about the interrogation process at the trial. I feel like the interrogation process that he went through was unfair. It was over the course of somewhere between two and three days. They held him. He didn't talk to any of his family members. He, by this point, after almost three days of questioning, he was almost delirious and just agreed to whatever the police said he did, even though the whole time previously he was saying he was not a part of the things that transpired.

4:08When John Reed Taylor was summoned to be on the jury in the case, she was in her early 20s, a few years older than Thedric Edwards. She had just graduated from college and was planning to go to law school and studying to take the LSAT. Before going into deliberations, what were you thinking about the case? I was thinking that they didn't have enough evidence to prove that he was with this group of guys. I was thinking that people deserve second chances. I was thinking that he hung out with the wrong crowd and was deemed guilty by association. It was a high number of years to life as the sentence, so without the possibility of parole.

5:04So the decision of this jury is going to decide his life. And he was 18 or 19 years old at the time that this happened. And that's a kid. Like, they don't really understand how the world works at that point. I'm 40, and I don't still understand how the world works. So it just seems like it probably was a very shocking experience or a traumatizing experience that he would have had during that time. The trial went on for four days. Then the judge sent the jury into a back room for deliberations. At no point in time was it like half and half, five and seven or six and six or anything like that. Once they found out what my position on the situation was, it was kind of like, we're just not going to pay attention to her.

6:01It was only two people who were of the train of thought that it was not guilty. And they swayed that other person over to them. How long did you deliberate? Maybe about an hour and a half, no longer than two hours. When they went back to the courtroom and some of the charges were read, John Rhee says she raised her hand for not guilty, and everyone else said guilty. Usually, when the members of a jury can't agree in a criminal case, there's a mistrial, and they'll do the whole trial again with a new jury. But that wasn't the case for Thedric Edwards. There was no mistrial, and he was convicted of aggravated rape, armed robbery, and two counts of aggravated kidnapping.

6:5511 to 1. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

7:15What did you do when you went home? I cried. I cried in the car.

7:25So, yeah, it was traumatizing for me. Just being a black person on a jury in, I don't know if I'm going too deep now, but like a former slave state. It's like our voice has never been heard. And for me to have that experience and feel like I didn't, I always said I didn't do jury service. I did a jury disservice. Like it was horrible for me. Like I felt like the justice system doesn't care about Black people.

8:07the thing that I can remember thinking is they gonna send this young boy up the river for the rest of his life and where I'm from that's you know the way they refer to going to jail going to the farm up the river like once the verdict was read out it was just he didn't raise his voice or make any gestures of, I don't know, anger. He just lowered his head and sobbed. He was sent to Louisiana State Penitentiary, and John Reed Taylor got a letter in the mail from the judge thanking her for her service. Did you go back to studying for the ELSA? I did not. I did not. It changed what I actually wanted to do with my life.

8:59So after that is whenever I stopped having ambitions of going to law school and just enrolled in school to get my master's degree in business administration. So, yeah, it had a big effect on the trajectory of my life. The laws of Louisiana states that 10 out of 12, a vote of 10 out of 12 can get you a conviction. Everett Norwood grew up in Baton Rouge. When I was young, I pretty much was a person who was not in very much trouble. So I really wasn't familiar with the court system up until I had reached an age of my mid-30s. And I started getting in trouble myself. And the court system really kind of confused me because of my ignorance of the law.

10:03He was arrested on November 14, 2003. I can remember that night before that, going out, being wild, getting high on drugs. And the next morning, you know, I really didn't want to go home tomorrow. wife at the time, because I always did whatever I did. I did it in the street, and I didn't take it home around my children or my family. So what I did was I waited till my wife went to work. Everett went inside the house. His daughter was still home. She was running late for school, and he helped her get ready. Me, myself, I don't know how to do hair that much. I can kind of I remember that she laughed at me.

10:50She was about 11 years old. And I did a hair the best I could, watched her get on the bus, and I got myself ready to go to work. Everett remembers stopping by a friend's place and heading to buy cigarettes on the way. The police pulled up on me and jumped out and said, get on the ground. They put him in handcuffs and drove him to a convenience store. Everett remembers that they didn't let him out of the car, and a man walked up. The police asked the man whether Everett was the person who had robbed him. He said yes. I was supposed to have been a guy 5 '6", 130 pounds, and here I am, a guy in the back seat of a police car, 236 pounds, 6 feet, 1 inch.

11:44The police charged Everett with attempted armed robbery, and took him to jail, where he waited for a trial. I mean, I'd done some things in my life that I wasn't proud of, but a robber, I was not. Drug addict? Yes, ma 'am, I was, and I did need help. But for me to come and take something from someone else, purposely, knowing that it wasn't mine, it wasn't me. One of the first things that happened in the trial was the jury selection. Everett remembers sitting with his defense attorney and the prosecutor while they took turns picking who to eliminate. I would tell my attorney, well, what about him?

12:29I think he's adequate. I think he's going to be fair. They were interviewing the jurors. But at the end of the day, when it all came out, every time a black juror would come up, they would strike him. okay, you can go, you can go, you can go. When it was finished, there was one black member of the jury. The other 11 were white. When those 12 were selected, when I looked at it, I knew off the top that I was going to have a hard time. Because most of them really were not my peers. They were mostly, what I'd say, a lot of white collars. Nobody was really blue collar. People from the neighborhood that know how life is being in the environment in which I come up in.

13:31Ultimately, or much of the time, jury selection was the whole game, essentially. Everett Norwood's lawyer, Thomas Frampton. In Louisiana and in most states, both sides get to exercise peremptory strikes, which means they get to strike potential jurors for good reason, for bad reason, basically for no reason at all, except that they cannot strike based on race or sex. So frequently, a black juror might be struck because they know somebody close to them who's been incarcerated or they've had negative experiences with the police. the U.S. Supreme Court has said that's a valid reason to strike somebody.

14:12Thomas Frampton started working as a public defender in New Orleans in 2014. He says he learned quickly that the outcome of a case would depend on who made it onto the jury. Prosecutors were looking for jurors who would trust prosecutors, who had a favorable or positive impression of the local police department, and generally speaking, those were jurors who tended to be whiter. He says there's generally a difference in who defense attorneys and prosecutors tend to strike. Prosecutors overwhelmingly use their peremptory strikes against non-white jurors, with the result of whitewashing jury pools and disproportionately overrepresenting white Louisianans as seated jurors.

14:59The same is true for the other side. Defense attorneys overwhelmingly use their peremptory strikes to reduce the number of white jurors in the pool. So it's this very interesting phenomenon where we have, at least on paper, a legal prohibition on race-based strikes. But in practice, it's still extraordinarily prevalent. Thomas Frampton began to learn the details of Everett Norwood's case in 2021. So the state alleged that Mr. Norwood, early one morning, pointed a gun at the victim outside of a gas station, asked for his wallet, and then never actually even took the money. The wallet dropped on the ground and he ran away.

15:47The trial went on for three days. Everett Norwood remembers that after the attorneys gave closing arguments, the prosecution called the man from the gas station back to the stand one more time. He asked the victim again. He said, are you sure that it was Mr. Norwood sitting right here in front of you that tried to rob you? And the guy said something like he was in Hollywood dramatized. He said, I see him in my sleep. I feel for my life. And all the jury said, oh. I said, oh, Lord, it's over. The jury took around five hours to deliberate, which Thomas Frampton says is a long time in Louisiana. I don't know what happened in the jury room.

16:36I mean, I wasn't there, and I don't like to speculate. But when it was all over, when they called me in to announce the verdict, Wow. When they said that it was 11-1, and the only vote that I got was the black vote, wow, that broke me down. I buckled at my knees. It was a hard pill for me to swallow. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Did you know the history of the law in Louisiana? Why it was this way, this non-unanimous? That goes way back. I can remember back, did my little research, when it was 9-3. 9-3. That got changed to 10-2. Um, anecdotally, everyone who practiced in Louisiana would tell you that when juries came back 10 to 2 or 11 to 1, it seemed like non -white jurors were grossly overrepresented amongst the holdouts.

17:56That was just sort of common knowledge, but there wasn't a lot of empirics to back it up. I mean, I just, in my head, it has to be unanimous, right? Like, that's how our system works. It has to be unanimous. And if it isn't unanimous, you go back to the drawing table. You know, like, it didn't work. And so there's another trial. But everybody has to be in agreement for a conviction to come down. Certainly that's the way it's worked in most of the United States. And that's the way it's worked throughout most of American history. But not in Louisiana. We'll be right back.

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20:36On a Friday night in January 1893, a group of men in masks arrived at a jail in a small town outside New Orleans. They were looking for three black men awaiting trial. There were two sheriff's deputies guarding the jail, but the men in masks knocked one of them unconscious. The other deputies showed them the way and unlock the men's cells. That night, the group murdered the three black men in the jail, Robert Landry, Alfred Jewell, and Jack Davis. A local paper published an article about the lynching calling it entirely inexcusable and saying that lynchings and lawlessness should be stopped. But it suggested that the way to do it was by allowing juries to convict people without a unanimous vote.

21:29The paper argued that people felt the need to take the law into their own hands when they didn't trust that the courts would convict. The article read, It is too often the case that juries do not wish to punish criminals. Nine jurors should be competent to bring in a verdict and so overthrow the power of a single person to disappoint or obstruct justice. Almost 20 years before the three men were lynched in New Orleans in 1875, Congress had passed a new Civil Rights Act. It made it illegal to bar someone from serving on a jury because of their race. Thomas Frampton says he's found records of Black Americans serving on juries long before that, including a man named Andrew Barland.

22:17Andrew Barland was serving as a juror in the 1810s and 1820s. So in fact, there's black jurors who were serving much earlier than folks have previously recognized. And I suspect there was plenty who served even earlier than him. But the standard account that there was no such thing as black jury service until the Civil War is certainly untrue. By the mid-1870s, almost one-third of the people called to serve on grand juries in New Orleans were black. But a new law gave judges and jury commissioners more power to decide which jurors were, quote, qualified. In the 1890s, black folks were still getting on juries.

23:02Not often, but they had enough political power in Louisiana that occasionally one or two black jurors would make it onto a seated pettit jury in a criminal case. Then, in 1894, a 30-year-old black man who went by Jim Murray was accused of murdering a white private watchman in New Orleans. Jim Murray tried to run, but he was arrested around 70 miles away in Mississippi. One newspaper wrote that when the police in Mississippi caught Jim Murray, he cooperated. He said that he'd been afraid to go back to New Orleans. He thought he would be lynched there. The newspaper said that Jim Murray admitted to killing the watchman, but said that it was an accident.

23:49Every member of the jury at Jim Murray's trial was white. Jim Murray tried complaining to the judge, but the judge just said that they had not discriminated against black men, quote, as a race or class, but instead because of, quote, their lack of intelligence and of moral standing. The jury deliberated for 10 minutes and announced a guilty verdict. Jim Murray was sentenced to death. A group of people in New Orleans heard that it had taken only 10 minutes, and they decided to try and do something about it. They called themselves the Citizens Committee. One of the founders of the Citizens Committee was a black lawyer and newspaper editor named Louis Martinet.

24:35In March of 1895, Louis Martinet's newspaper published an article about Jim Murray's case. It read, quote, Such a ten-minute verdict is simply murder under legal forms and serves to show what little consideration the average white juror in Louisiana has for even life when the possessor is colored. The Citizens Committee raised money to help in Jim Murray's case, and they declared, the Jim Crow jury should be fought to the death. The next year, 1896, they made it to the Supreme Court. But the court ruled against Jim Murray, saying that there had been at least a few black jurors in the initial selection pool, Two months later, he was executed.

25:23In 1898, Louisiana held a constitutional convention, and representatives proposed a rule that would require only nine jurors to convict someone of a felony. It passed. In a speech to close the convention, a chairman said, our mission was, in the first place, to establish the supremacy of the white race in this state to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done. By amending the state constitution and allowing for non-unanimous verdicts in criminal cases, it almost didn't matter if a few black jurors every now and then managed to make it onto a jury because they didn't have to get you listened to.

26:10In the 1970s, the cases of three men convicted on non-unanimous verdicts made it to the Supreme Court. When the cases got to the U.S. Supreme Court in the early 70s, none of this history was known or briefed. So you go back and you read those opinions and the racial origins of the law and the racist discriminatory impact of it today barely figure into the opinions, if at all. The court didn't side with any of the three men. Around the same time, Louisiana changed their constitution to require 10 jurors out of 12 for a conviction instead of 9, but it still didn't have to be unanimous. When Everett Norwood went to prison in 2004, he and his lawyer tried to argue that the split jury was unconstitutional, but it didn't work.

27:07Still, Everett started learning to do his own legal work. I had to go to the law library myself and do a lot of research because I knew that, hey, my life is on the line here. If I don't fight, if I don't educate myself in the center of the law, I'd never go home. Were there other people that you met who were incarcerated at the same time who had had non-unanimous jury verdicts? Oh, yes, indeed, ma 'am. Yes, indeed. There are a lot. Every prison that I went during this term that I was incarcerated, I've been to a few prisons. They had multiple people. In 2018, people in Louisiana were voting on a constitutional amendment, one that would begin to require unanimous juries to convict.

28:03During a state hearing, one white district attorney said, You hear a lot about this being a vestige of slavery. No doubt that is true, but it is what it is, and that was 138 years ago. The amendment passed for cases going forward. That same year, a man named Evangelisto Ramos filed a petition to the Supreme Court. He'd already been convicted of murder and was serving life without parole in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola. They convicted him on a non-unanimous jury. I think it was 10-2, as a matter of fact, and that's what really got things started. Inside Angola, there was a man who'd been looking at a lot of non-unanimous cases.

28:53His name was Calvin Duncan, and he was serving a life sentence. For years, the prison had paid him to help people with their cases. He made 20 cents an hour as a jailhouse lawyer. He hadn't finished high school, but the New York Times later wrote about him. He knew how to spot a promising legal issue, and he was relentless. Seasoned lawyers sought his advice. Calvin Duncan had been convicted by a unanimous jury, but he started to notice one case after another with non-unanimous verdicts. He couldn't stop thinking about it. Then he started writing to the Supreme Court. Along with other men in Angola, Calvin Duncan tried to get over 20 cases to the Supreme Court, filing petitions.

29:42These jailhouse lawyers continued to press the issue until the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided that they were going to hear the case, in this case called Ramos. This was in 2019. Everett Norwood remembers waiting to hear news about the case. When I saw Ramos on the front page of the newspaper, I jumped for joy. Evangelisto Ramos got a new trial, and the jury found him not guilty. It was unanimous. I said, man, it's on for us now. And I got right on it. Everett Norwood tried to appeal his case, but his appeal was eventually denied. It wasn't only me. Everybody that I knew that would fall after Ramos into the district court got denied.

30:33And everybody got the same answer. If you were convicted by a non-unanimous verdict in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the early 2000s, even up to a few years ago, the Ramos decision doesn't necessarily apply to you. It only applies to new cases. and recent non-unanimous verdicts that haven't been finalized. But someone else in Angola had filed another petition to the Supreme Court around the same time. A man who'd been convicted 11 to 1 when he was a teenager, accused of crimes around the same time as his graduation weekend, Thedric Edwards. So when the Supreme Court took the Edwards case, I got interested in looking through the files and saw that, as in many of these non-unanimous cases, there were only one or two black jurors, and they were the holdout jurors.