By Mrs. Eileen Hunter — about the author. Posted August 11, 2026.
This page is Louisiana context. Mr. Hunter’s filings make no claim under Ramos, and the formal record does not disclose his jury’s numerical split — see the note at the end.
The Jim Crow origin
For 120 years, Louisiana allowed felony convictions without a unanimous jury — 10 votes out of 12 sufficed. The rule was adopted at the state’s 1898 constitutional convention, whose stated mission — quoted by the U.S. Supreme Court — was to “establish the supremacy of the white race,” and whose jury rule was designed to dilute the votes of Black jurors. Only one other state, Oregon, ever had a similar rule. Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83 (2020).
What changed
- 2018: Louisiana voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous verdicts — but only for crimes committed on or after January 1, 2019.
- 2020: In Ramos v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court held the Sixth Amendment requires unanimity in state felony trials, ending split verdicts for cases still on direct appeal.
- 2021: In Edwards v. Vannoy, 593 U.S. 255, the Court held Ramos does not apply retroactively on federal collateral review — leaving people convicted years earlier by split juries without a federal remedy.
- Since: The Louisiana Supreme Court declined to make Ramos retroactive as a matter of state law, and legislative efforts to create a review path for the roughly 1,500 people still imprisoned on split verdicts — including a 2025 bill — have failed.
Why it belongs on this site
The non-unanimous jury is the clearest modern example of a Louisiana criminal-justice structure that was built for an unjust purpose, produced convictions for a century, and was defended as settled law until the day it fell. It is context for how this state’s system has treated challenges to convictions generally — including the post-conviction process documented on the appeals page, where serious claims are routinely resolved without evidentiary hearings.
Where Tony Hunter’s case stands on this issue
Tony Hunter was convicted in 2004, when Louisiana still permitted 10–2 verdicts. Whether his own verdict was unanimous has never been established on the record — and there is an account of why.
The slip at the verdict — Mr. Hunter’s account
According to Mr. Hunter, when the jury returned its guilty verdict his trial attorney, Robert Johnson — who, with co-counsel Bobby Manning, represented Mr. Hunter at trial (trial transcript, appearances) — handed him a slip reflecting the vote as 10 to 2, a non-unanimous verdict, and asked whether he wanted to keep it. Distraught at the moment of conviction, Mr. Hunter declined. Counsel did not request that the jury be polled, and no copy of that slip, and no notation of the numerical split, appears in the court record. Asked about it afterward, counsel’s position was that polling the jury was not necessary.
This is Mr. Hunter’s recollection of the moment of his conviction. We report it as his account. Because the jury was not polled and the slip was not preserved, the split cannot be confirmed from the record — which is itself the point of the account.
Why this is a question about counsel — not a Ramos claim
It is important to be precise, because the law here is not what many readers assume. A 10–2 verdict was lawful in Louisiana in 2004. Ramos v. Louisiana (2020) later held such verdicts unconstitutional — but Edwards v. Vannoy (2021) held that Ramos does not apply retroactively to convictions already final on collateral review, and Louisiana has declined to make it retroactive as a matter of state law. Mr. Hunter’s conviction became final in 2006. So even a documented 10–2 verdict would face the retroactivity bar; this page does not claim Ramos overturns his conviction.
What the account raises instead is a question about the completeness of the record and the performance of trial counsel: a jury that was not polled, a verdict slip that was not preserved, and a numerical split that — if the account is accurate — would have been non-unanimous under a rule the Supreme Court has since called a relic of Jim Crow. Ineffective assistance of trial counsel is among the grounds Mr. Hunter has raised in post-conviction proceedings. (Procedural history.)
The other half
No court has found that Mr. Hunter’s jury was non-unanimous, and no filing presently before the courts raises a Ramos claim — the retroactivity doctrine forecloses it. The account of the verdict slip is Mr. Hunter’s recollection, unverifiable from a record that does not contain the slip. We publish it because a conviction a man says he was told was 10–2 — on a rule since held unconstitutional, in a case with no physical evidence and only jailhouse informants — is worth knowing, precisely weighed. If records ever surface that confirm or refute it, this page will say so, per our corrections policy.