People convicted by "Jim Crow juries" still incarcerated despite Supreme Court ruling

Jermaine Hudson was just 20 years old in 1999 when he was pulled over for a traffic stop. He was told there was a warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery. Hudson had been arrested before and his mugshot was included in a photographic line-up, and the accuser chose his photo.

He was charged and convicted -- by a 10-2 split jury.

Hudson would spend the next 22 years in prison for a crime that he didn't commit -- and actually never even happened. Earlier this year, his accuser recanted, admitting that he made up the robbery so he could avoid telling his parents he had spent his money on drugs.

"If prosecutors had had to get all 12 people, they couldn't've convicted you," 60 Minutes+ correspondent Wesley Lowery said to Hudson.

"They couldn't have convicted me," Hudson said.

Hudson was released earlier this year after his accuser confessed that he had sent an innocent man to prison, but he is far from the only person to have faced injustice by a split-jury conviction.

Split-jury convictions were allowed in Louisiana due to a state law dating back to the Jim Crow era. In 2018, a coalition of civil rights activists and formerly incarcerated people launched a ballot initiative to ban split-jury convictions in Louisiana and require a unanimous jury vote.

That initiative became Amendment 2, which passed overwhelmingly with Louisiana voters. Two years later, the U.S. supreme court followed suit -- ruling in the landmark Ramos v. Louisiana decision that the practice was unconstitutional.

Jamila Johnson, an attorney with the Promise of Justice Initiative, a Louisiana-based criminal justice reform organization, called the ruling powerful.

"There were people in that room who had worked on this issue for 20 years. There were people in that room who had been convicted with non-unanimous jury verdicts. There were people who-- everything was riding for them on the decision that those Supreme Court justices were going to relay," Johnson said. "And to have Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch announce that this was a Jim Crow law in the way that he announced it."

"A pretty conservative justice," Lowery said.

"Pretty conservative justice to say this really told our clients what they always knew was true," Johnson said.

Despite the ruling, the split-jury convictions were not tossed out.

"Our clients, I think like most people, assume that when the U.S. Supreme Court says, 'You were convicted with a Jim Crow law and it was unconstitutional, it violated the 6th and 14th Amendments,' that there would be some remedy," Johnson said. "Unfortunately there isn't always a remedy."

The Supreme Court decided that it would not require retroactivity in split-jury convictions, which meant that while no additional people could be convicted by split juries, it was up to the state to decide if those who had been convicted by a split jury had a right to a new trial.

Now, cases are being re-investigated and petitions are being filed for new trials. For more on that, check out Lowery's 60 Minutes+ report, streaming now on Paramount+