The Trouble With The Ten Commandments

The State of Louisiana has mandated the posting of the Ten Commandments in its schools, which is deeply problematic as a constitutional matter and in substance. It is Dominionism which is something that the U.S. Bill of Rights specifically sought to prohibit.

Court cases have allowed the posting of "In God We Trust", and "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, under the rubric that it is "ceremonial deism". 

The Trouble With The Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments are more problematic (indeed, even the numbering of the Ten Commandments is a matter of sectarian division that any posting of them with numbers takes sides in as an establishment of religion).

This is why the U.S. Supreme Court held 44 years ago that a Kentucky law almost identical to the law just passed by Louisiana was unconstitutional in Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) despite the fact that it differed from the Louisiana law by mandating the the posting be funded without public money. The holding there is summarized at the link as follows:

In a 5-to-4 per curiam decision, the Court ruled that the Kentucky law violated the first part of the test established in Lemon v. Kurtzman, and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. The Court found that the requirement that the Ten Commandments be posted "had no secular legislative purpose" and was "plainly religious in nature." The Court noted that the Commandments did not confine themselves to arguably secular matters (such as murder, stealing, etc.), but rather concerned matters such as the worship of God and the observance of the Sabbath Day.

What are the Ten Commandments? 

According to Exodus 20:2-17 (not the only place that they appear in the Hebrew Bible):

1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

The 1st Commandment is the establishment of a particular religion in its purest form and un-American.

2. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

The first sentence 2nd Commandment, with its ban on making images of real things, while it survives in Islam to some extent, isn't actually honored in its literal form by ether Jews or Christians. The remainder, again, is the pure establishment of religious and un-American. Promising divine punishment for the great-great grandchildren of pagans (including most South Asians and some leading GOP politicians in Louisiana) isn't a great thing for Louisiana to enshrine in its schools.

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

The 3rd Commandment is confusing to kids and adults. Is it a ban on false oaths, on false prophets, on saying YHWH outside of religious ceremonies, or on swearing? Do we want to put school teachers in the position of having to explain this fine point of theology to their students?

4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The 4th Commandment divides Jews, Christians (and denominations within them), and Muslims, each of whom have different holy days, again in an un-American establishment of religion.

5. Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.

The 5th Commandment isn't just about being nice to your parents. It also adopts Zionism, another un-American establishment of religion, which the children of Louisiana have no reason to be told is a divine mandate.

6. You shall not murder.

The 6th Commandment is often translated "thou shall not kill" which is a poor fit to Louisiana with its death penalty. Otherwise, the 6th and 8th Commandments just go to show that even a broken clock is right twice a day. And, of course, the Ten Commandments were literally broken in the Bible.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

The 7th Amendment isn't the law in Louisiana. Adultery is no longer a crime in 33 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and the several U.S. territories. States which have decriminalized adultery in recent years include West Virginia (2010), Colorado (2013), New Hampshire (2014), Massachusetts (2018), and Utah (2019). Adultery is rarely enforced criminally in the 17 states that still do have adultery laws on the books. In 13 of the states where adultery is still a crime (Arizona, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, North Dakota, South Carolina, and Virginia), it is a petty offense (the maximum punishment in Maryland is a $10 fine), or is a misdemeanor. It continues to be a felony in four states (Idaho, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Wisconsin) and is punishable most severely among those states in Michigan who someone convicted of adultery faces up to four years in prison. It is a crime that is actively enforced for active duty members of the U.S. military under the U.S. Code of Military Justice. It is, of course, also an act which the presumptive GOP nominee, and more than one other form President have admitted to, and which is one that few school children have any reason to care about.

8. You shall not steal.

See the 6th Commandment. 

9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

Does the 9th Commandment imply that it is O.K. to give false testimony against someone who is not your neighbor? If so, that is a problem and encourage clannish disregard for the law.

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

The 10th Commandment translated above as "male or female servant" would have been more accurately translated "male or female slave" which is outright un-American. We fought a war over that. It also implicitly categories wives as property.

More generally

A more subtle point about the Ten Commandments is that Jesus in the Gospels said that the Old Testament Hebrew laws don't apply to Christians who aren't Jews. By presenting the Ten Commandment as authoritative, the State of Louisiana is defying the Christian Gospels to which most residents of the State of Louisiana nominally adhere.

And, let's also say that the Hebrews of the Hebrew Bible, as portrayed in their own sacred account of themselves (probably compiles while in Babylonian exile or under Roman rule as an official statement of what their religion said for use by the non-Jewish governments that ruled them), are by 21st century moral and ethical standards, horrible, awful people.

Jewish law isn't just the Ten Commandments. It is also a deeply morally flawed list of other laws, call for absurdities like the death penalty for wearing wool-cotton blend fabrics or being left handed. And, the Jewish people repeatedly engage in genocide that they themselves account (see, e.g., the Book of Numbers).

There is very, very little about the Hebrew people as described in the Hebrew Bible (a.k.a. the Old Testament) or their laws from that source that is good or honorable or provides a good moral model.

Fortunately, modern rabbinic Judaism has somehow managed to salvage decent messages from this horrible source material with doctrine and wordplay in the Talmud and other commentaries. Judaism at lived in the 21st century is quite decent and indeed better than most Christian denominations. But the Jews of the Hebrew Bible were closer to the worst strained of fundamentalist Muslims today than they are to modern rabbinic Jews.

The Aftermath Of Banning Non-Unanimous Jury Verdicts

The failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to make it landmark procedural ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana retroactive is so glaring that it is one of many rulings that undermines its legitimacy as an institution that vindicates justice. 

The U.S. Supreme Court declared split-jury verdicts unconstitutional in 2020, in a ruling known as Ramos v. Louisiana.

Oregon had been allowing split-jury verdicts since 1934, after a Jewish man accused of murder was convicted of a lesser charge because of a single juror holdout. Louisiana enshrined non-unanimous juries in its constitution in 1898, during a convention where the stated purpose was “to establish the supremacy of the white race in the state.”

The Supreme Court ruling left it up to Oregon and Louisiana to figure out what to do with the hundreds of people already in prison for such convictions. On Oct. 21, Louisiana’s Supreme Court ruled against vacating those convictions, leaving the door open for the state legislature to take action. Oregon’s Supreme Court is similarly poised to rule on the issue, in an appeal . . . that could impact an estimated 250 to 300 other inmates in the state.

From here. 

Will The Louisiana Supreme Court Uphold LWOP For Defendants Convicted With Non-Unanimous Verdicts?

The U.S. Supreme Court held in Ramos v. Louisiana (U.S. October 2019) that non-unanimous state court jury verdicts in felony cases, allowed under a procedurally quirky U.S. Supreme Court precedent from 1972 that only two U.S. states, Louisiana and Oregon, availed themselves of, were unconstitutional. This happened around the same time that Louisiana, one of the two states, amended its constitution to prohibit such verdicts based upon a ballot issue decided in the 2018 general election. 

But in a follow up case, Edwards v. Vannoy (U.S. 2020), the U.S. Supreme Court held, along the usual 6-3 conservative-liberal divide in the court, that this ruling was not retroactive to cases in which direct appeals had been exhausted already, because it was not a "watershed rule" of criminal procedure.

Now, the Louisiana Supreme Court has taken a case to decide, as a matter of state constitutional law independent of federal law and not subject to review by any other court, if the ban on non-unanimous verdicts will be applied retroactively. The defendant in the test case has currently served 29 years in prison of a life without possibility of parole sentence, based upon a 10-2 jury verdict that would have resulted in an immediate retrial in 48 other states and in the federal courts.

I have no idea how the Louisiana Supreme Court is likely to rule, and it makes sense that it would take up the case, even if it is planning to hold that the ruling is not retroactive, because this exactly clean and narrow legal issue is outcome determinative in so many cases.

About 1500 cases are affected by the ruling and would have to be retried if the law is applied retroactively to cases that are now cold. The defendants are mostly serving life possibility of parole sentences, because shorter sentences are either still eligible to benefit from the new law because they are still on direct appeal, or have been full served.

The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide if a ban on non-unanimous jury verdicts applies retroactively under the state constitution, as it considers the case of a man convicted of murder and sentenced to life for a 1993 slaying in Plaquemines Parish.

The case of Reginald Reddick, who was convicted by a 10-2 jury vote that is no longer allowed, sets up a decision by the state’s highest court that could affect as many as 1,500 Louisiana inmates, most of them serving life sentences without parole.

Convicted by split juries years ago, their appeals exhausted, those inmates missed a shot at new trials when the U.S. Supreme Court last year refused to make its 2020 ban on divided juries retroactive. Still, advocates have argued that the high court's ruling doesn't prevent the Louisiana Supreme Court from deciding that those older split verdicts violate the state's constitution and should be tossed.

From here. 

As previous coverage from the same newspaper noted:

In Louisiana, four in five of the 1,500-plus inmates serving time under split jury decisions are Black; more than one in four has served at least 20 years already. The longest-serving inmate known to have been convicted by a split jury has been incarcerated since 1967. . . . 

The roster includes more than 900 inmates who are serving life sentences without the possibility of parole -- a terminal sentence in which Louisiana, which incarcerates more people per-capita than any other state, easily leads the nation.

The older the case is, the less troubling to public safety a vacated conviction that is impracticable to retry would be, because the reality is that inmates who serve long sentences tend to "age out" of the time period where they are prone to commit crime and have low recidivism rates. 

This is balanced against the fact that more recent convictions, where the risk of recidivism if a defendant was rightfully convicted in a split verdict that would not have to have been retried before the defendant was convicted, are typically easier to retry.

Non-Unanimous Verdicts Produce More Wrongful Convictions

The risk of non-unanimous verdicts leading to wrongful convictions in Louisiana was real. In Louisiana, 40% of exonerated criminal defendants were found guilty by non-unanimous juries.

Jury verdicts aren't terribly accurate in the first place. As I've noted before, judges and juries agree on the verdict in roughly 78% of criminal jury trials. But judges are much less likely to acquit defendants than juries do (3% v. 19%+), and there are a small but significant number of wrongful convictions by juries (3.3% to 5% in death qualified capital murder-rape cases, and probably somewhat less in ordinary felony cases).

A very large percentage of criminal cases (95% would be typical), however, are resolved by plea bargains, which also sometimes result in wrongful convictions, although for mostly different reasons.

So, while the percentage of wrongful convictions in cases that actually go to trial is troubling high, the percentage of all cases that are wrongful convictions as a result of inaccurate jury verdicts is a much smaller share of criminal convictions (about one in 500).

Given that 18% of known exonerees pleaded guilty to crimes they didn’t commit, which suggest that the rate at which people plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit is at least about one in 2,375, although this is surely an underestimate since not all people who plead guilty to crimes that they didn't commit are exonerated, in part, because there are stronger procedural bars to doing so, and in part, because people are less likely to challenge the often shorter sentence received as a result of a plea bargained conviction. (About 65% of 418 exonerees who pleaded guilty were people of color, and 83% of DNA exoneration plea cases resulted in identification of the alternate perpetrator.)

Unanimous Juries (corrected)

Before the election, there were only two states that allowed non-unanimous juries to convict people of felonies (a practice constitutionally authorized by the U.S. Supreme Court): Oregon Washington State and Louisiana. 

Now there is just one, Oregon Washington State, because Louisiana changed its law in a ballot issue that passed this past Tuesday.

It's time for Oregon Washington State to end its status as an outlier on this issue.

In Louisiana, 40% of exonerated criminal defendants were found guilty by non-unanimous juries.

New Orleans Doomed

Louisiana in 2100 (predicted)

About 10% of the land in Louisiana, including essentially all of New Orleans, will be underwater by 2100, due to subsiding delta silts and rising sea levels. The engineering effort necessary to make a big dent in this trend is mammoth. Much of New Orleans is already below or just barely above sea level, the state has lost a large share of its wetlands to the sea, and Hurricane Katrina cost the city about half of its population on a long term basis.

If the latest predictions by scientists are even partially correct, Katrina may be just the first significant blow of many to one of the nation's most historically and culturally rich cities.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I bear no ill will for New Orleans, and indeed consider it one of the South's most interesting and worthwhile cities. The authors of the scientific journal article cited by the linked Science News article, at least one from a Louisiana university, no doubt earnestly want New Orleans to survive. And, disaster isn't imminent. The time horizon is for gradual (or more likely sporadic but unidirectional) loss of Louisiana's Gulf Coast over 91 years.

The point the science makes is pretty simple. Sea levels are steadily rising -- steps to stop global climate change and model corrections may impact the rate of sea level rise, but won't stop or reverse it. The Mississippi delta in the vicinity of Louisiana is also sinking, which makes Louisiana more hard hit than many other vulnerable sea level cities. Both the rising sea and sinking land are relentlessly making changes without reversing themselves, not cycling back and forth, at fairly predictable rates. Nothing conceivable is going to stop the sea level from rising or the delta from sinking at some rate. There have been major losses already which we have not stopped with engineering. The scale of the problem is enormous, comprising 10% of the land in Louisiana. The kind of efforts that are necessary for an even partial save of some of the Gulf Coast (perhaps perserving a string of access to Louisiana in the manner of the Florida Keys and saving New Orleans itself a la Venice or parts of the Netherlands) is an immense engineering undertaking.

My headline is hyperbole, of course. But, the point is serious. New Orleans is doomed unless someone does something to save it, and the steps that are necessary to do that on the scale that is really necessary (this report reveals that this scale is much greater than most people had previously assumed) haven't even been really put on the drawing board, let alone commenced in the long process of designing, cost estimating, funding, and building a world wonder class engineering project.

Can America and the world save New Orleans? It is possible. It will cost many billions of dollars. The Denver International Airport and Boston's Big Dig cost on the order of a billion dollars and then is a task orders of magnitude larger. It is likewise bigger than the task of building an aircraft carrier which costs about $15 billion. Forced to guess from the little that I know, I'd estimate that it would cost something on the order of the mid-hundred of billions to low trillions of dollars just to save New Orleans and a little strip of land to access it. No one that I've heard from has talked about that kind of major national investment yet.

Should the investment be made? I'm not even trying to get my hands around that question in this post. I'm simply pointing out a credible report passed on from a respectible scientific journal and explaining the threat it describes to one of our nation's oldest cities, then improving a sense of what would be involved to deal with it in this extended comment. Broad discussions armed with facts generally produce the best results. And, while locals may be most knowledgable about New Orleans' prospects, this problem is on a scale that it can solve on its own (nor can private industry).

Louisiana Doomed?

Bad Astronomy's Illustration

Bad Astronomy comments on Louisiana's recent election of a creationist Governor. Their loss is our gain. He used to be in Congress. Texas and South Carolina also have creationist governors.

Small Town Louisiana Still Racist

The criminal cases of the Jena 6 show how little has changed in small town Louisiana.