When hundreds of incarcerated people across Oregon and Louisiana were given a chance three years ago to retry cases where they were convicted by nonunanimous juries, they had one man to thank: Evangelisto Ramos.

But while his 2020 landmark win before the U.S. Supreme Court rippled through the criminal justice system, Ramos himself was still stuck in Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the country and one notorious for alleged human rights violations.

That was, until last month, when a jury unanimously acquitted him of the murder charge that had sent him to prison for life in 2016.

When the jury came back after just four hours of deliberations, Ramos was in disbelief. According to Rebecca Mermelstein, an attorney with O'Melveny & Myers LLP who represented him at his retrial, Ramos needed to have the "not guilty" verdict repeated back to him to be certain he had heard it correctly.

"It's a funny thing because he was very sure about the outcome," Mermelstein told Law360. "He really had a deep faith in his innocence and the capabilities of his own lawyers, which was humbling."

This was Mermelstein's first turn as defense counsel in a criminal trial. She joined O'Melveny at the end of last year after spending more than a decade as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. She served as lead counsel in the Ramos case along with O'Melveny partner Mark Racanelli and local co-lead counsel Sarah Chervinsky. 

Before defending Ramos in his retrial, O'Melveny had also taken the lead on his U.S. Supreme Court appeal, Ramos v. Louisiana , which resulted in a landmark ruling in 2020 that the Sixth Amendment's unanimous jury requirement applied to state court as well as federal.

Ramos' case was important to Mermelstein because, as a former federal prosecutor in New York, where it has long been a requirement that juries render unanimous verdicts, it was baffling to her that a person could be sentenced to life in prison even when two jurors dissented.

"If you think about why the standard of proof in a criminal trial is so high and why you have to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, to then say it's enough if most people think that the person is guilty is so problematic and was frankly so foreign, given the system I was coming from," she said.

As an ex-prosecutor, Mermelstein was also floored by how inadequate Ramos' defense was in his initial trial and how much the Louisiana prosecutors were able to get away with as a result, from a dearth of evidence to a witness perjuring himself on the stand.

"And so a big part of what we had to do in the second trial was make sure those improper things that happened the first time weren't going to happen again," she said.

A Second Try

Ramos was arrested in the fatal stabbing of Trinece Fedison. Law enforcement suspected Ramos because he had been seen with Fedison the day before her 2014 murder, and some of his DNA had been found on Fedison's body. But there was much that contradicted their theory, and Mermelstein said it was clear from reading the transcripts in Fedison's first trial that police were convinced of Ramos' guilt and had done little to investigate alternatives.

One example, Mermelstein said, was Fedison's cell phone. While her phone was not found with her body, her parents told police that when they called her number after her murder, it was still ringing, meaning the battery was still alive.

But police never tried to find the phone, nor did they contact Fedison's phone company and ask to view her text messages so they could find out when she had stopped texting, Mermelstein said. She said this would have been especially important evidence because there had been a long gap between when Fedison was seen with Ramos and when her body was found.

Police also collected physical evidence from the crime scene but never tested it for DNA and fingerprints, Mermelstein said. They even received an anonymous tip about a different suspect but did not investigate it.

"And so a big part of our team's defense was: There's so much we don't know here about what happened, and that's not the defense's fault, that's the state's fault," she said. "It's their burden to prove their case, and they have not done an investigation that could make anyone confident in who actually committed this terrible crime."

There were also several details of the case that proved Ramos more likely to be innocent than not, Mermelstein said. For instance, police found no blood inside Ramos' apartment, where prosecutors alleged that Fedison was killed.

Even if Ramos had mopped up, investigators used forensic tools that should have detected the presence of blood if it had been there on the day Fedison died, Mermelstein said. But they found none and had no explanation for why.

"In an amazing moment for us at trial, our local co-counsel was questioning the lead detective about the case and he admitted on the stand that, even sitting here today, years after this crime was committed, he could not say where the murder had taken place," she said. "And I think that really undermined the idea that you could say with any confidence who had done it."

Ramos' first trial was also tainted by racist sentiments, Racanelli said.

He said a number of witnesses, including the lead detective, testified that one of the reasons they suspected Ramos was because Fedison was murdered with a knife.

"And, 'Everyone knows that Hispanics kill with knives.' That is a piece of testimony that came out not once but twice in the first trial in an American court, which in our view, obviously was deeply prejudicial and unfair," Racanelli said.

That kind of rhetoric was not repeated in Ramos' second trial. Prosecutors chose instead to highlight what they viewed as discrepancies between Ramos' testimony on the stand and his initial interview by police on the day of the murder. However, Racanelli said that both recordings, played for the jury at the second trial, actually appeared to help their case.

"He was so insistent and earnest in those recordings about his innocence," Racanelli said. "It is exactly the kind of thing that if you were innocent of a crime you would say and how you would say it, and having the jury hear that at the second trial I think was very important."

The tapes, though, highlight the tragedy of Ramos' case and so many others like his, Mermelstein said.

"You have someone who has been found innocent, but he has spent more than eight years in prison," she said. "His documents have expired. His possessions are long gone. His lease was over, and people thought he was never coming home. Even for someone who's had this huge vindication, it's really difficult to try to start again."

Setting a New Precedent

There's no doubt that Ramos' unanimous acquittal is important, not just for Ramos himself, who is finally free, but for all those who have been convicted on what the Supreme Court now agrees were unconstitutional grounds.

"It's a great example of why the prior system was so problematic," Mermelstein said. "It really shows you that it led to innocent people being convicted."

Ramos' Supreme Court appeal, argued by O'Melveny special counsel Jeffrey L. Fisher, reversed a precedent set by the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon , which found that the Sixth Amendment applied only to federal courts. At the time, Oregon and Louisiana were the only two states that chose not to adopt the unanimous jury requirement.

By the time the high court reversed the precedent, only Oregon remained. Louisiana passed a law ending nonunanimous verdicts in 2018, two years after Ramos was sent to prison with a 10-2 verdict. But the law specified that it would not apply retroactively, leaving Ramos and many like him left with few options. Even the Supreme Court ruling in Ramos' case was seen as vague at first about whether the precedent could be applied retroactively.

This issue ultimately landed in the high court in May 2021 with Edwards v. Vannoy . In that case, a conservative Supreme Court majority found that only defendants who hadn't exhausted all their appeals, like Ramos, could seek a retrial. At the same time though, the court left states free to take action on their own to apply the ruling to closed cases, a step that the Oregon Supreme Court eventually took in December 2022, opening up hundreds more cases to potential retrial.

If Mermelstein and Racanelli have learned anything from their representation of Ramos, it's that a strong defense for these retrials will be pivotal.

"The difference in the first two trials wasn't only [a unanimous verdict requirement]," Mermelstein said. "It was all of these strategic things and investigative things, and it shows you how important it is to do that. If you do it right, you get the right outcome."

But Mermelstein and Racanelli said they don't have current plans to participate in more retrials of nonunanimous jury verdicts. They took up Ramos' case in large part because the firm had already built up a relationship with him on the Supreme Court appeal.

"And so the firm felt it was very important to us, because he was very important to us, that we see this case through," Racanelli said. "It was totally natural that we would have done this retrial. Whether we do more of them, I think it just depends on the circumstances and the opportunities that are presented, but they are incredibly important cases."

--Editing by Jill Coffey.

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Update: This story has been updated to include the local co-lead counsel on Ramos' second trial.