06/16/2026
Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in Hamed Kian v. Florida, No. 25-6623, to decide whether criminal defendants are entitled to a twelve-person jury under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution. Florida remains an outlier as one of only two states that regularly use six-person juries to decide the outcome of criminal cases, including those where life imprisonment is mandatory. Mr. Kian argues the Supreme Court’s decision in Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 (1970), allowing six-person juries is impossible to square with the ruling in Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83 (2020), that the term “trial by an impartial jury” in the Sixth Amendment encompasses what that term “meant at the time of the Sixth Amendment’s adoption,” which was a jury of twelve. The co-chairs of FACDL’s amicus curiae committee—Benjamin Eisenberg and Jackie Perczek—previously made the same argument to the Supreme Court in an amicus brief filed in Parada v. United States, No. 25-155, which also discussed the racist origins of Florida’s six-person jury provision and the negative consequences it has caused.
