![]() In the Apodaca case, eight justices wanted to apply the jury clause equally at both the state and federal levels, but they disagreed on how to do it, he said. ![]() The disparate treatment of the Sixth Amendment in state and federal trials is unlikely to persist, according to Darryl Brown, a law professor at the University of Virginia. In a case decided in February, the court noted that this is the only instance of a Bill of Rights protection that applies differently at the federal and state level. Oregon that the Sixth Amendment requires verdicts in federal cases to be unanimous, but did not apply the unanimity requirement to the states. The Supreme Court held in the 1972 case Apodaca v. At the time he was convicted, only Louisiana and Oregon allowed for convictions by split juries. Ramos was convicted by a split jury after 10 members of a twelve-person jury found him guilty, and two did not. Ramos, who was the last person known to have seen her alive, denies that he killed her, and said that he saw her getting into a car with "two black men" after he and Fedison had sex. In the second case of the day, the justices will hear from attorneys for Evangelisto Ramos, who was convicted in 2016 of stabbing to death a woman named Trinece Fedison, and leaving her body in a trash can. Louisiana man convicted of murder by a split jury The Kansas Supreme Court ruled against Kahler in May of 2018, finding that eliminating the insanity defense does not violate either the state or federal constitution. "This Court has long recognized that States have broad discretion to make the moral, legal, and medical judgments necessary to determine when mental illness should excuse criminal conduct," Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in a brief with the top court. On the other side, the Trump administration has weighed in in favor of Kansas. The American Civil Liberties Union also submitted a brief arguing that the abolition of the insanity defense is unconstitutional. ![]() The case has spawned an unusual flurry of philosophical and medical debate, prompting briefs from professors of philosophy and the American Psychiatric Association, both in Kahler's favor. It "defies a fundamental, centuries-old precept of our legal system: People cannot be punished for crimes for which they are not morally culpable," he wrote. Green wrote that Kansas's abolition of the insanity defense violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, which bar cruel and unusual punishment and guarantee due process. "Although he knew that he was shooting human beings, his mental state was so disturbed at the time that he was unable to control his actions," attorney Jeffrey Green wrote in a brief with the court. In Kansas and four other states, defendants are barred from invoking the so-called "insanity defense," or claiming that a mental illness prevented them from understanding that their actions were wrong. Kahler's attorneys have argued that an idiosyncrasy of Kansas law prevented their client from receiving fair trial before he was convicted in 2011 and sentenced to death. While in a state that one doctor described as "stress induced short-term dissociation," he shot and killed his family members while chasing them room to room through their home in a spree that was partially recorded on the grandmother's Life Alert system. After his wife left him and pursued a relationship with a female co-worker, Kahler grew obsessed, turned to stalking, and was fired from his job. The justices will hear first from attorneys for James Kraig Kahler, who was convicted of murdering his wife, two children, and his wife's grandmother in a fit of rage over Thanksgiving weekend in 2009. They were brought by two men convicted of murder in Kansas and Louisiana.
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