News / FJP Releases
When Freedom Is at Stake, Every Juror Counts
FJP Urges Supreme Court to Restore the Constitutional Right to Twelve-Person Juries
August 14, 2026 (Washington, D.C.) — Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP) filed an amicus brief in the case of Kian v. Florida, urging the Supreme Court to hold that people charged with serious criminal offenses that can result in prison time have a constitutional right to a twelve-person jury under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments.
For centuries, twelve-person juries were widely understood to be an indispensable part of the constitutional right to a jury trial. English common law and early Supreme Court decisions all recognized twelve jurors as the standard in serious criminal cases. That changed in 1970, when the Court’s decision in Williams v. Florida allowed states to use six-person juries in some felony trials. FJP’s brief argues that the reasoning behind that decision no longer holds up in light of the Court’s more recent ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana, which reaffirmed that juries in criminal trials must reach unanimous verdicts in accord with the Sixth Amendment’s original public meaning.
Decades of research have shown that twelve-person juries deliberate more thoroughly, remember evidence more accurately, consider a wider range of viewpoints, and are more likely to reflect the diversity of their communities than six-person juries. Those differences help produce more reliable verdicts and strengthen public confidence in the fairness of the criminal justice system.
Prosecutors and law enforcement have a strong interest in ensuring that the public trusts the criminal justice process and accepts its outcomes as fair. When a person’s freedom is at stake, a twelve-person jury reflects what the public has long understood and expected a jury trial to be: a broad cross-section of the community coming together to weigh the evidence and decide the case. Meeting that expectation matters because confidence in an outcome depends not only on the verdict itself, but also on whether people believe the process used to reach it was fair, representative, and worthy of their trust.
“Justice is not only about getting the right result. It’s about ensuring people know the process was fair,” said Fair and Just Prosecution Executive Director Aramis Donell. “When someone’s liberty is on the line, every voice in the jury room matters. A twelve-person jury helps ensure decisions are thoughtful, representative of the community, and worthy of the public’s trust.”
Read the full amicus brief here.