SALEM — An international human rights group on Tuesday, March 30, urged Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum to lift her opposition to reversing nonunanimous jury convictions — recently declared unconstitutional — against people who have completed their appeals.

Since Oregon enacted its law in 1934, juries could convict people of most felonies by a 10-2 or 11-1 vote. Louisiana was the only other state that allowed nonunanimous jury convictions, until voters struck down the law in 2018.

Last April, the U.S. Supreme Court found nonunanimous jury convictions unconstitutional in the case of Ramos v. Louisiana. It allowed Oregonians who were in the middle of their appeals process to have their convictions overturned and retried by the courts.

But hundreds convicted by nonunanimous juries remain in Oregon prisons because their cases and sentences were final at the time of the high court’s decision. They are now seeking post-conviction relief in civil court in hopes of having the Ramos decision apply to them and getting a chance for retrials.

Prisoner advocates have criticized Rosenblum, saying she is blocking that relief.

“It’s something that should be changed, and the attorney general has the power to do that,” John Raphling, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

In a letter written by Raphling, the group said nonunanimous juries are discriminatory and “violate international human rights law and undermine the integrity of Oregon Courts.”

Rosenblum spokesperson Kristina Edmunson said the attorney general’s office has already sent back hundreds of cases on appeal for retrials and it is “committed” to reviewing the remaining cases after the U.S. Supreme Court makes a ruling in a pending case that will explicitly address whether past nonunanimous jury convictions should get retrials.

“I cannot resolve Oregon’s nearly 100-year practice of less than unanimous jury decisions by executive fiat,” Rosenblum said in the statement. “It is the courts that decide what the Constitution requires. And the Legislature is the place to decide the best policy for the state based on the will of the people.”

Raphling noted that the United States participates in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits policies that restrict rights based on race or policies that appear to be race neutral but create racial disparities.

Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law was put in place “almost explicitly as a way to marginalize the voices of racial and ethnic minorities,” Raphling said.

He was referring to a sensational murder trial in Oregon in 1933 involving a Jewish suspect that prompted a public vote to create the law.

The law appears to have succeeded in its intent, Raphling said.

In Multnomah County, Black people are incarcerated at roughly six times the rate of white people, according to a study of 2014 incarceration data by the MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge cited by Human Rights Watch.

Black people represent 18% of petitioners in Ramos cases statewide and 45% of petitioners in Multnomah County, according to a study by the Criminal Justice Reform Clinic at Lewis & Clark Law School. Census Bureau figures show just 3% of Oregonians identify as exclusively or partly Black, including 8% of Multnomah County residents.

“Just because these are past convictions doesn’t mean that harm hasn’t been done and that she shouldn’t be taking steps to mitigate that harm,” Raphling said.

Though Rosenblum has spoken in support of getting rid of nonunanimous convictions in Oregon, she filed a brief opposing the Supreme Court’s decision in the Ramos case, citing the “practical consequences” of retrying hundreds and potentially thousands of past cases.

Doing that, she argued, would “retraumatize crime victims and survivors and overwhelm our state’s criminal justice system.”

Instead, Rosenblum is choosing to block civil court petitions to revisit cases that have exhausted appeals until courts decides whether Ramos applies retroactively to concluded cases.

“The issue of retroactivity is a legal doctrine that was specifically not decided by the Ramos decision,” Edmunson previously told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Edmunson said if the office chose to do as people are suggesting, “it would not be based on the current state of the law — either federal or state.”

Raphling urged Rosenblum to not “prioritize efficiency over fairness” and uphold the rights of those convicted by the now unconstitutional rule.

“By refusing to give those convicted under the non-unanimous jury rule who have completed their appeal an opportunity to reverse their conviction, you are arbitrarily deciding that some people’s rights are too burdensome to honor,” Raphling wrote.