Both sides weigh in on 6-member jury challenge

Adult murder defendants have a right to a 12-member jury, even in non-death penalty cases, but juveniles don’t under Florida’s six-person jury scheme, Human Rights for Kids argues in a recent U.S. Supreme Court brief.

“It's a glaring disparity where a child who may spend the rest of his life in prison has less rights and protections than similarly situated adults,” says CEO and founder James Dold, a Washington D.C., attorney.

The brief highlights nearly 60 cases where six-person juries found juveniles guilty of serious crimes.

The group joins the Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the ACLU, NAACP, the Cato Institute, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and others in supporting a South Florida chiropractor’s challenge of Florida’s use of six-member juries to try non-capital cases.

Justices in June agreed to hear an appeal from West Palm Beach chiropractor Hamed Kian, who was convicted of practicing without a license four years ago, despite the objection of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.

The Supreme Court got it right in 1970 when it upheld the use of six-person juries for non-capital cases in Williams v Florida, Uthmeier argues.

“For nearly as long as states have had a Sixth Amendment duty to provide criminal jury trials, this Court’s message to the people of Florida has been clear: the jury structure that they have settled on for a century and a half fulfills that duty.”

Florida has 5,000 criminal convictions pending appeal, Uthmeier warned, and he noted that five other states — Arizona, Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, and Utah — follow a similar practice.

“Overruling Williams would force the use of public resources to conduct thousands of retrials on top of the trials already pending and might well result in the release of convicted criminals into the public.”

In October 2025, the Fourth District Court of Appeal, without comment, rejected Kian’s argument that the lack of a 12-person jury violated his Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

Kian’s attorneys argued that the concept of a 12-member jury originated in 1215 with the Magna Carta and that’s what the Sixth Amendment framers contemplated.

The 1,000-member Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the 2,000-member Florida Public Defender Association agree with Kian in a joint amicus brief.

Their brief argues that six-person juries were established in the post-Civil War era as part of a racist effort to exclude Blacks.

“Amicus respectfully submits that the historical record shows the six-person jury was born of deliberate efforts to suppress Black voices in public affairs, including jury service, and urges the Court to restore the right to a jury of 12.”

The Williams decision was based on a faulty “functionalist” reasoning that six-member juries are just as capable of reaching of a just decision as a larger panel, the brief argues.

Newer research proves the assumption is incorrect, the groups argue.

“Larger juries give jurors who hold a minority view a greater opportunity to influence the verdict, largely because it is difficult to maintain a minority viewpoint without allies,” the brief states. “A 12-person jury provides a greater chance that there will be more than one juror with a minority viewpoint, and therefore that the minority viewpoint will be able to influence the majority and ultimately the verdict.”

Yale Law Prof. Ahkil Reed argues that Williams ignores the plain meaning of the Constitution and runs counter to the Supreme Court majority’s originalist philosophy and “meta-precedent.”

“In a series of landmark twentieth-century constitutional cases across a wide range of issues, this Court repeatedly overruled a prior case or line of cases simply and solely because the Court believed that the prior case law mangled the Constitution’s true meaning, and no special factors, such as reliance, prevented a judicial broom sweep.”

At least one justice, Neil Gorsuch, agrees.

When the Supreme Court declined in 2022 to hear an Arizona defendant’s challenge to an eight-member jury, Gorsuch dissented.

Calling Williams “wrong the day it was decided,” Gorsuch wrote that “Florida does what the Constitution forbids because of us.”

Twelve-member juries are more representative of the community and speak with greater authority, argues a group of 38 current and former prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and former judges from jurisdictions across the country.

“When twelve members of the community hear the evidence, deliberate, and unanimously pronounce judgment, the verdict carries an authority no prosecutor or law enforcement officer could marshal alone,” the group argues. “That is because the public is more likely to accept the outcome when a representative jury drawn from the community decides it.”

Larger jury pools don’t give an innocent defendant greater protection from an unjust conviction, Uthmeier counters.

Statistics show that Florida juries convict criminal defendants at comparable, “and possibly even slightly lower” rates than juries in jurisdictions that use 12 jurors, Uthmeier wrote.

Between the years 2017 and 2019, felony juries in Florida convicted defendants at rates of 74.0%, 73.3%, and 72.1%, respectively; felony juries in Texas convicted at rates of 79.0%, 81.0%, and 78.0% respectively; and felony juries in California convicted defendants at rates of 86.0%, 85.0%, and 84.0%, respectively, Uthmeier wrote.

The risk of overturning Williams could extend even beyond upending thousands of criminal convictions, Uthmeier warns, noting that the Supreme Court relied on the reasoning in Williams when it decided in 1973 in Colegrove that the Seventh Amendment permits six-person juries in civil cases.

“Consequently, nearly 90% of federal civil verdicts would also be in jeopardy.”

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