"I can't go back, man. I served 10 years. It'll break me to go back."

He was a proud man but he trembled and flinched a little as he said that. He clearly didn't want to talk about his time in prison, but there was an existential urgency that forced his words out.

He was at the courthouse that day because there's a backlog of cases in Oregon still being re-trialed. He had been convicted over a decade ago, you see, by a jury split 10 to 2.

Oregon prides itself on being a unique laboratory of democracy in the country, where it's relatively easy for citizens to put measures on the ballot, even constitutional amendments. We were the first state in the nation to recognize the right to Assisted Suicide in 1994 and universal vote-by-mail in 1998. But not every product of democracy is a winner.

In 1933 a lone Oregonian juror heroically refused to convict a Jewish man of the murder of a Protestant, only accepting a manslaughter charge. A groundswell of racist and nativist outrage quickly swept in the state, which had only just revoked its racial exclusion laws and had sizable KKK and fascist membership. Conservative newspapers like The Oregonian published episodes bemoaning how ridiculous it was that a single juror could veto the bloodlust of a democratic majority.

And so an amendment to Oregon's Constitution was quickly passed that relaxed the constraint of unanimity, allowing juries to convict or acquit against the votes of up to two dissident jurors.

The man speaking to FIJA activists as we passed out literature was one of the great many convicted under this dramatically weakened jury system. A system that the US Supreme Court had endorsed in 1972, before overruling in 2020. In 2022, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that this judgment was retroactive, entitling those with non-unanimous convictions to new trials.

The result has been a mess, with cases, sometimes decades old, being re-tried in a giant backlog. Judges have even ordered middle-aged survivors to farcically play-act and pretend while testifying before the jury that brutal rapes that occurred when they were in college *just happened.* And sadly most incarcerated people in Oregon have no idea if they were convicted non-unanimously because no one polled their jury and no records were kept.

But some were lucky enough to have evidence of dissident jurors, lucky enough to get their convictions dropped and re-trials scheduled. This was how a man, bent and broken from ten years of torture in a box, could breath the free air and cling to a FIJA pamphlet, thanking us for our work.

Today, racist and nativist rhetoric is again rising, with many conservative voices denouncing the refusal of grand juries in LA and DC to indict protesters against Trump's military occupation forces. Just as papers like The Oregonian howled in 1933 that the jury system should be thrown out rather than allow "mixed-blood halfbreeds" to get a say, today there's a storm of outrage that cities with significant black and latino populations should be allowed juries, lest they have the audacity to nullify bad laws or see higher justice in letting a protester who threw a sandwich go free.

Authoritarians and populists have always despised juries and the check against state power they represent. Attacks on juries are nothing new. But Oregon is an important reminder that the impact of such demonization of juries can last a very long time.

It is also a reminder that dissent today, even when it seems meaningless or ineffectual, may one day matter. Two jurors stubbornly resisting their peers and loudly refusing to convict may not have thought their efforts mattered a decade ago, when he was convicted and sentenced. But today his torture has ended, or at least been significantly interrupted.