The Oregon Supreme Court Building in Salem, home to the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. 

An Oregon defense attorney who fought to reverse the state’s unconstitutional practice of convicting people without a unanimous jury has been elevated to the appellate bench.

Gov. Tina Kotek announced Wednesday that Ryan T. O’Connor will fill a vacant seat on the Oregon Court of Appeals in Salem, effective immediately.

“He has successfully litigated some of Oregon’s most complex and important criminal cases,” the governor’s office said in a statement.

O’Connor, 46, represented Jacob K. Watkins, who had appealed his 2010 Marion County rape conviction because it was reached by a split jury.

Oregon and Louisiana were the only states in the nation to allow non-unanimous jury convictions until the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 2020.

The Watkins decision, as it came to be known, came two years later, when Oregon’s highest court determined that all non-unanimous verdicts would be retroactively overturned. Hundreds of convictions have since been re-litigated or settled in the wake of the landmark ruling.

Another prominent client of O’Connor is Jesse Lee Johnson.

Johnson spent 25 years behind bars but was freed after the murder case against him was revealed to be rife with inconsistencies and allegations of investigators’ racial bias.

O’Connor — who was born in Olympia, Washington and a graduate of the University of Portland and Notre Dame Law School — will now sit in judgment where he once argued.

“I look forward to joining the excellent and hardworking judges on the Court of Appeals in serving the people of the State of Oregon,” O’Connor said in a statement.

He is taking a spot left vacant since October, when Judge Josephine H. Mooney resigned.