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Date: 06-28-2021
Case Style:
STATE OF LOUISIANA Vs. LAURENCE A. MCKEE
Case Number: 2019-KA-0949
Judge: SANDRA CABRINA JENKINS
Court: COURT OF APPEAL
FOURTH CIRCUIT
STATE OF LOUISIANA
Plaintiff's Attorney: Leon Cannizzaro, District Attorney
Donna Andrieu, Assistant District Attorney
Irena Zajickova, Assistant District Attorney
ORLEANS PARISH
Defendant's Attorney:
Description:
New Orleans, LA - Criminal defense attorney represented Laurence McKee with a second degree
murder charge.
On December 8, 2016, an Orleans Parish grand jury returned an indictment
charging defendant with second degree murder, in violation of La. R.S. 14:30.1.
On January 5, 2017, defendant entered a plea of not guilty.
A jury trial commenced on January 22, 2019. On January 24, 2019, the jury
rendered its verdict, finding defendant guilty of second degree murder. Defendant
requested that the jury be polled, revealing a non-unanimous 10-2 guilty verdict.
On March 11, 2019, the trial court denied defendant’s motion for new trial
and defendant waived delays for sentencing. The trial court then sentenced
defendant to life imprisonment without benefit of probation, parole, or suspension
of sentence.
This timely appeal followed.
DISCUSSION
In his sole assignment of error, defendant argues that his constitutional rights
under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
were violated by the lack of a unanimous verdict.
At the time of defendant’s trial, in January 2019, Louisiana law allowed for
non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials of a case in which the crime occurred
prior to January 1, 2019. See La. C.Cr.P. art. 782(A).3 Accordingly, in this case,
2
The factual background of this case is not pertinent to the determinative issue in this appeal.
3
Following the passage of a Louisiana constitutional amendment in 2018, La. C.Cr.P. art.
782(A) was amended and reenacted, effective January 1, 2019, to provide, in pertinent part, as
follows:
A case for an offense committed prior to January 1, 2019, in which punishment is
necessarily confinement at hard labor shall be tried by a jury composed of twelve
jurors, ten of whom must concur to render a verdict. A case for an offense
committed on or after January 1, 2019, in which the punishment is necessarily 3
the trial court instructed the jury that only ten of the twelve jurors must agree in
order to reach a verdict. Furthermore, at that time, the controlling Louisiana
jurisprudence consistently upheld the constitutionality of non-unanimous jury
verdicts for cases tried before a twelve-person jury. See State v. Bertrand, 08-2215
(La. 3/17/09), 6 So.3d 738 (upholding the constitutionality of La. C.Cr.P. art. 782,
which sanctioned non-unanimous verdicts of ten out of twelve jurors in cases in
which punishment is necessarily confinement at hard labor).
While defendant’s appeal was pending review in this Court, on April 20,
2020, the United States Supreme Court rendered its decision in Ramos v.
Louisiana, announcing a new constitutional rule: the Sixth Amendment right to a
jury trial—as incorporated against the States through the Fourteenth Amendment—
requires a unanimous jury verdict to convict a defendant of a serious offense.
Thus, the United States Supreme Court ruled definitively that non-unanimous jury
verdicts in state felony trials are unconstitutional. In addition, Ramos invalidates
the non-unanimous convictions of defendants who preserved the issue for review
in cases still on direct review. Ramos, __ U.S. at __, 140 S.Ct. at 1406-08; see
also, Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 328, 107 S.Ct. 708, 716, 93 L.Ed.2d 649
(1987) (“a new rule for the conduct of criminal prosecutions is to be applied
retroactively to all cases, state or federal, pending on direct review or not yet
final”).
confinement at hard labor shall be tried before a jury of twelve persons, all of
whom must concur to render a verdict.4
In this case, the State contends that defendant failed to preserve the issue of
his non-unanimous jury verdict for review in this appeal, and the State argues that
defendant is not entitled to relief under Ramos because he failed to file a pretrial
motion for a unanimous verdict or to contemporaneously object when the nonunanimous verdict was rendered. But we find no merit to the State’s argument,
considering that the Louisiana Supreme Court has issued numerous per curiam
opinions directing the appellate courts to consider the issue of a non-unanimous
jury verdict as part of its error patent review, and stating as follows:
The matter is remanded to the court of appeal for further proceedings
and to conduct a new error patent review in light of Ramos v.
Louisiana, 590 U.S. --, 140 S.Ct. 1390, -- L.Ed.2d – (2020). If the
non-unanimous jury claim was not preserved for review in the trial
court or was abandoned during any stage of the proceedings, the court
of appeal should nonetheless consider the issue as part of its error
patent review. See La. C.Cr.P. art. 920(2).
The present matter was pending on direct review when Ramos v.
Louisiana was decided, and therefore the holding of Ramos applies.
See Griffith v. Kentucky, 479 U.S. 314, 328, 107 S.Ct. 708, 716, 93
L.Ed.2d 649 (1987).
State v. Monroe, 2020-00335 (La. 6/3/20), 296 So.3d 1062; see also State v.
Taylor, 18-1039 (La. App. 4 Cir. 6/17/20), __ So.3d __, 2020 WL 3264072.
Accordingly, in reviewing this record on appeal for errors patent, we find
that the holding in Ramos applies in this case and renders defendant’s conviction
by a non-unanimous jury verdict unconstitutional.
Outcome: For the foregoing reason, we hereby vacate defendant’s conviction and
sentence and we remand this matter to the trial court.
Plaintiff's Experts:
Defendant's Experts:
Comments: