Abortion
Justice Kavanaugh Suggests He Might Be Willing To Overturn Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that the principle of stare decisis has never required the court to uphold 'erroneous precedents.'
By Robert Coleman
May 6, 2020
In a case that might appear to have no bearing on the right to abortion, a U.S. Supreme Court justice may have signaled a willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade.
In Ramos v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that criminal defendants must be convicted by unanimous state juries, overturning a Louisiana murder conviction based on a 10-2 jury verdict. This decision overturns the court’s 1972 ruling in Apodaca v. Oregon, which held there is no right to a unanimous jury verdict in state courts.
Under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, criminal defendants have the right to a unanimous jury verdict. Yet in Apodaca the court said this only applies to federal jury trials, and Oregon’s law permitting non-unanimous convictions in state court is not a due process violation.
As of 2020, only Louisiana and Oregon permitted convictions by majority vote. (In 2018, Louisiana amended its state constitution to require unanimous verdicts, and this change went into effect for criminal trials after January of 2019.) But as the court noted in Ramos, states like Louisiana and Oregon started to permit jury verdicts by majority vote in the late 1800s to suppress minorities, and to disenfranchise jurors who were black or religious minorities. The court further noted these changes were supported by the Ku Klux Klan.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/06/justice-kavanaugh-suggests-he-might-be-willing-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/
