[5][8] The Louisiana Legislature passed a similar "Majority Rule" law in 1880, allowing for jury verdicts of 9–3, which was later ratified at its 1898 constitutional convention.

[5][13][14] Robert Apodaca, Henry Morgan Cooper, Jr., and James Arnold Madden, were convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, burglary in a dwelling, and grand larceny, respectively, in separate trials in Oregon state court.

549 (1969),[16] that had upheld the provision of the Oregon Constitution allowing the 10–2 jury practice as not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Johnson v. Louisiana (a case decided by the Supreme Court on the same day as Apodaca), a criminal defendant in Louisiana raised the same issue: whether a less-than-unanimous jury verdict in state court criminal cases violates a defendant's constitutional rights.

[3] The Supreme Court of Louisiana affirmed his conviction, holding that a 9–3 jury verdict did not violate his equal protection or due process rights.

[21] First, the Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to trial by jury found in the Sixth Amendment (made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment[19]) was not violated by a less-than-unanimous jury verdict in state criminal court.

In its reasoning, the Court recognized, as it did in Duncan[19] and Williams,[23] that the purposes of a jury included to "safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge," and to inject into the trial "commonsense judgment of a group of laymen".

But the Court rejected the idea that this requirement is found in the Sixth Amendment, because the reasonable-doubt standard arose after the Constitution was written and is instead rooted in due process.

[27] Second, the Court also held that jury unanimity is not mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment's requirement that racial minorities not be systemically excluded during voir dire, the process by which jurors are chosen for a trial.

[35] Recent scholarly debate has focused on the historical origins of Oregon and Louisiana's less-than-unanimous jury practices.

Oregon's constitutional amendment was put on the ballot[6] a year after a lone holdout juror prevented a Jewish man from being found guilty of murdering a Protestant one.

[13] On Nov. 25, 1933, the day after the jury convicted on the lesser offense of manslaughter (resulting in a three-year sentence), The Morning Oregonian "railed against the juror in an editorial tinged with racist undertones and nativist fervor," in which the editors wrote that "the vast immigration into America from southern and eastern Europe, of people untrained in the jury system, have combined to make the jury of twelve increasingly unwieldy and unsatisfactory.

"[13][36] Previous editorials around the same time "bemoaned 'mixed-blood' jurors and lamented the role that some immigrants played on juries, questioning their 'sense of responsibility' and 'views on crime and punishment.

[26] Louisiana's legislature changed its Code of Practice to allow for non-unanimous jury verdicts in 1880, during the Jim Crow era.