Louisiana jurors can’t go home until they reach a verdict. A new bill could change that.

The days are long, often stretching past sunset and late into the night. If you are granted a reprieve, you will get one without a television or smartphone, inside an inexpensive hotel room, under guard. More likely than not, though, you will be expected to keep toiling until your work is done.

Welcome to jury deliberations in Louisiana’s state courts, where the law mandates that jurors who have begun deliberating must be sequestered or continue uninterrupted until they reach a verdict.  

It’s an anachronism that all but three other states have abolished and U.S. federal courts have disposed of long ago. Now, a bill that overwhelming passed in the Louisiana House would revise the existing statute, giving judges the authority to send deliberating jurors home.

Criminal justice advocates, along with the state associations of district attorneys and judges, support House Bill 271. Sponsored by state Rep. Richard Nelson, R-Mandeville, its backers tout the bill as a way to ensure more robust deliberations and fairer verdicts. The bill was approved in the House with a 87-17 vote, and now heads to the state Senate.

If signed into law, the bill would strip the sequestration requirement from Louisiana’s laws in all but capital cases. It would allow judges to send jurors home, where they can refresh and return the next business day to begin deliberations anew.

Its few opponents, including House Speaker Pro Temp Tanner Magee, R-Houma, worry that a break in deliberations, which would give jurors access to their phones, television and friends and family, could increase the temptation to explore or discuss the case. But supporters say there’s little evidence that would happen, and it is outweighed by the prospect of better-considered verdicts.

“We have a situation that does not necessarily lead to the best decision making,” said Nelson, a first-term representative who is running for governor. “I think that it’s really in the interest of justice to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you go home and sleep on it and then come back, and then maybe everybody can agree on what the correct verdict is.”

Past problems

Forcing juries to sequester after they begin deliberations is so rare that Paula Hannaford, director of the Center for Jury Studies, which aids courts with jury management, was surprised to hear it’s still enforced in Louisiana.

“Almost every other state abandoned that 25, 35, years ago,” she said.

Three years ago, House Bill 644, sponsored by state Rep. Edmond Jordan, D-Baton Rouge, attempted to end Louisiana’s sequestration requirement.

It included guidelines intended to set reasonable working hours for jurors, according to the bill’s author, Megan Garvey, president of the Louisiana Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and attorney with the Orleans Public defenders, but it never made it out of committee.

Lengthy debates

The earlier bill arrived before courts felt the ripple effects of a 2018 change in state law that required unanimous jury verdicts, or the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Ramos v. Louisiana, which outlawed the practice across the country and hastened its adherence here.

That decision “changed the landscape of sequestration” in Louisiana, said East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore, as juries were forced to reach the high bar of unanimous verdicts.

The hurdles of sequestration — which include finding last-minute and contiguous hotel rooms, and overtime hours for sheriff’s deputies — are often burdensome for local courts.

“If you have ever tried to scramble to find a hotel on a Friday night for 14 people, in a city with two colleges and constant weekend events, then you know it’s nearly impossible,” Moore said.

Instead, jurors frequently debate into the night or the early morning hours to reach a verdict or declare that they are simply unable to do so.

Last week, an East Baton Rouge jury deliberated until 1:30 a.m. before announcing they could not reach a verdict in the first-degree rape trial of Karl Johnson. Days before, an Orleans Parish jury deadlocked after midnight in the second-degree murder trial of Darrin Jones.

Mistrials, also known as hung juries, “are a significant drain on resources and are extremely stressful for victims or survivors, who know they have to repeat the process,” said Loren Lampert, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association. “Anything that might reduce those numbers … is a positive.”

‘Shortcuts deliberations’

Current law allows judges to relieve jurors for the day so long as they have not begun their deliberations, but attorneys say that judges often give jurors their charge at the end of a long day, forcing them to begin their debates when others might be sitting down to dinner.

While research has not explored the effects of uninterrupted deliberation that stretches overnight, “I imagine that it shortcuts deliberations in a lot of really important ways,” said Cynthia Najdowski, a professor at the University at Albany who has studied the psychology of juries.

The best jury deliberations are founded in discussions on evidence, she said.

But jurors who are “deliberating endlessly when they are exhausted” or who face sequestration may turn to verdict-driven discussions, which shift from a focus on evidence to “convincing the jurors with the minority viewpoint to join the majority,” Najdowski said. “It’s a more coercive deliberation.”

Other issues

Advocates of the bill have argued it could lead to more just verdicts. Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, whose office has lobbied in support of the bill, said it could also lead to more diverse jury pools. 

“Jury service can be a considerable hardship for any resident with a limited support system and little flexibility in their family and employment obligations,” he said. “We’re disproportionately excluding communities who, for one reason or another, can’t afford to serve.”

Louisiana allows jurors to return with a verdict of a lesser conviction — for example, deciding a defendant who has been charged with murder is instead guilty of manslaughter. But the ability to debate the charge in addition to the verdict can lengthen jurors discussions, said Will Snowden, executive director of the Vera Institute of Justice in New Orleans.

In that case, in order to go home, jurors may “compromise on a lesser verdict,” he said.

Concerns remain

Despite its broad support in the House, detractors argued in the recent debate that the bill could compromise the sanctity of jury deliberations.  

“We are injecting, through your bill, influences outside of the courtroom” into deliberations, Magee argued. He did not return a voicemail requesting an interview. 

A 2020 survey by the Center for Jury Studies of more than 451 judges across the country — nearly half of whom had spent more than 11 years on the bench — found that 72% of judges had never experienced jury misconduct that involved the media.

“That tells me it’s either an exceptionally rare event, or it literally is happening all the time and nobody knows about it,” Hannaford said. “And if it’s happening in the background, then there’s not a bloody thing you can do about it.”