(Louisiana Illuminator) — A bill that would allow a committee to recommend parole to incarcerated people convicted in Louisiana through non-unanimous jury verdicts has advanced from a state legislative committee.
Senate Bill 215, approved 4-3 Tuesday along party lines in a Senate judiciary committee. would allow the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections to create a committee to review the appeal records of cases with non-unanimous convictions.
Incarcerated people with non-unanimous jury convictions would be able to send an application for parole to the committee within its first year. The committee would end after three years.
Democrats and advocacy groups opposed the bill, saying it does not go far enough to correct the problems.
The bill is meant to address possibly unjust convictions that are no longer legal in Louisiana after a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous verdicts passed in 2018.
The original law allowed for convictions on as little as a 9-3 vote. It was part of the 1898 constitutional convention and designed to dilute Black jurors’ votes.
Louisiana changed the requirement to a 10-2 vote during the 1973 constitutional convention. Oregon, the only other state that allowed non-unanimous juries, had the same requirement.
In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a Louisiana case that non-unanimous convictions were unconstitutional, in violation of the Sixth Amendment. A 2021 decision from justices in a separate case left it up to states to decide whether they would apply the prior year’s ruling retroactively.
Under the advancing bill, clerks of court would provide parole applicants with their records free of charge, and district attorneys and victims could respond at hearings.
Sen. Patrick McMath, R-Covington, who wrote the bill, said the legislation was a compromise between district attorneys who believed in the validity of convictions and criminal justice reform advocates.
“There’s likely not a way that either of those groups can come to a full consensus, but I think it was important to have the discussions and to continue to have the discussions,” McMath said.
Bradley Burget, top prosecutor for Catahoula and Concordia parishes and board president for the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, supported the bill.
“We’re not exactly happy with it,” Burget said. “There’s a lot of the members of the DA’s association that may not be 100% for this, but I think this is something that they can live with.”
Zach Daniels, the DA association’s executive director, liked the bill’s provision giving the committee authority to determine which non-unanimous convictions are just because “many of these contain strong evidence and are valid convictions where the prosecutor played by the rules at the time.”
Before the legislative session, the association found at least 1,215 cases a review committee could analyze.
Daniels said it would be impossible to retry all of these cases because witnesses, police officers and victims might be unavailable, and evidence may no longer exist.
The extensive list of issues the committee could consider includes the length of jury deliberations, the strength of the state’s case, the effectiveness of the defense attorney and evidence of racism.
Former state Rep. Randal Gaines, now chairman of the Louisiana Democratic Party, filed a similar bill in 2022 that included the same list of issues that could be reviewed.
Herman Evans, who spent 37 years in prison after a non-unanimous jury convicted him in 1989 for a second-degree murder he did not commit, opposed the bill. Even after the perpetrator confessed in 2012, Evans did not get his conviction overturned until 2024.
“That bill ain’t going to do nothing,” Evans said. “They’ve got the parole board. They’ve got the clemency board. It’s about the same board. And it costs about the same if you bring them back and let them get denied.”
Daniels said the expected cost to implement the bill is $1.8 million, based on a study resolution Rep. Charles Owen, R-Rosepine, authored last year.
Owen also filed House Bill 219 that would allow courts to have resentencing hearings for nonunanimous convictions. The House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice has not heard the bill yet.
One issue that arose in the Senate committee hearing on McMath’s bill was the governor’s impact on the committee.
The governor would appoint to the committee three retired appellate court judges or Louisiana Supreme Court justices, one retired district attorney or assistant district attorney and one retired public defender.
The district attorney and public defender appointees would come from a list of three nominations from the Louisiana District Attorneys Association and the state public defender.
Although all five members would need to agree that a conviction was unfair, the current bill would allow the governor to make final decisions on releasing applicants.
The current bill does not provide details on the governor’s power. Daniels said the bill would eventually include that language after input from attorneys from the governor’s office.
Daniels also noted that there may be some conflict between the committee’s final decision and Gov. Jeff Landry’s tough-on-crime approach. When he was attorney general, Landry argued against abandoning non-unanimous verdicts when the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the Louisiana case.
Sarah Gozalo of the Promise of Justice Initiative, which helped Evans get his conviction thrown out, expressed concerns about the governor’s ultimate power.
“If we find that miscarriage of justice, the solution is: We will ask the governor — the one person who, in 2018, opposed getting rid of non-unanimous jurors,” Gozalo said.
Other opponents of the bill suggested keeping it in committee until it was amended to address their concerns.
Bruce Reilly, deputy director of Voice of the Experienced, and Erica Navalance, a criminal defense attorney, recommended adding post-conviction evidence to the records the review committee sees to prove claims of ineffective defense counsel or prosecutorial misconduct.
McMath declined to defer the bill.
“I think that holding it up in this committee doesn’t necessarily give the chance to continue to move on through the process, where we all know that things sometimes can change and get new input,” McMath said.
Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, who had a similar bill in 2025 that did not pass, objected to the bill’s advancement.
“Just know that this is not an easy objection for me,” Duplessis said. “And if this bill does advance, I want to continue, or at least I want to work with you, to try to find a solution because it’s been stated repeatedly, we’re not quite there.”
