The Oregon House on Thursday approved a measure that would ask voters to overturn the state’s decades-long practice of allowing split juries to convict felony defendants, an anomaly within the American criminal justice system that reform advocates have targeted as deeply flawed and racist.

House Joint Resolution 10 sailed through the lower chamber, 56-0, in an unanimous vote by lawmakers.

“I believe this is a stain on our criminal justice system,” said House Majority Leader Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland), one of the bill’s chief sponsors. “When a defendant’s freedom is on the line, their guilt or innocence should not be subject to majority rule."

The resolution, which proposes changing Oregon’s Constitution to require juries to reach unanimous verdicts in all criminal cases, now goes to the state Senate. Should it pass there, Gov. Kate Brown’s likely signature would then send the referendum to voters in 2020.

Throughout the legislative session, opponents to the measure have been few and far between. Groups representing Oregon’s district attorneys as well as the state’s defense bar publicly backed the measure, as did the Oregon Department of Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon and the Oregon State Bar.

While a handful of current and former state prosecutors have argued previously that the current system helps reduce the number of hung juries and benefits crime victims, none testified against the resolution.

Oregon is the only state in the country that allows juries in most felony cases — aside from murder — to convict defendants with a 10-2 vote. Federal courts and all other states require an unanimous verdict for crimes such as manslaughter, rape and arson.

Last fall, voters in Louisiana, the only other state that has allowed nonunanimous juries, rejected their system of split-verdict convictions. A relic of the Jim Crow era, it was adopted during Louisian’a 1898 constitutional convention to diminish the influence of black jurors upon verdicts, scholars say.

Oregon’s distinction as the last state with nonunanimous juries hasn’t sat well with lawmakers. Williamson previously told The Oregonian/OregonLive that they are “one of the most racist parts of our criminal justice system."

Such views echo those of reform advocates and legal scholars, who say split-jury verdicts are a holdover to an era when discrimination toward racial and religious minorities was endemic to public life.

"The entire system is rooted in discrimination" said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, where she directs the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic.

In 2017, Kaplan published an influential article in the Oregon Law Review that argued how nonunanimous juries were a remnant of Oregon's less-tolerant past and undermined the state's criminal justice system and.

According to Kaplan, it was a sensational murder trial involving a Jewish suspect that prompted Oregon voters in 1934 to enshrine a nonunanimous jury system into the state constitution.

Kaplan’s article also argued that split-jury verdicts are likely to limit evidence-based jury deliberations, since one or two dissenting perspectives can be dismissed by a majority of jurors. They may also increase wrongful convictions and marginalize minority jurors whose votes aren't needed, Kaplan wrote.

The analysis quickly captured the attention of criminal justice reformers, state lawmakers and even some judges.

While no agency or body in the state tracks nonunanimous convictions, a study by Oregon’s Office of Public Defender’s Services in 2009 offered some insight. It found that more than 40 percent of the 662 convictions it surveyed from 2007 and 2008 were nonunanimous.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanauagh; 503-294-7632

Email at skavanaugh@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @shanedkavanaugh

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