Beth Schwartzapfel is a staff writer who has been with The Marshall Project since its launch in 2014. She often covers addiction and health, probation and parole, and LGBTQ+ issues. Her work has won many awards and has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today and NPR. Before joining The Marshall Project, she covered the criminal justice system as a freelance journalist for more than a decade.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that non-unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials were unconstitutional, but it didn't make the decision retroactive. That left it up to Louisiana and Oregon to decide if it would apply the ruling to people incarcerated by split juries.