The Founders Loved Jury Trials. Almost No One Gets One Anymore.

[Kamaji]

The Founders Loved Jury Trials. Almost No One Gets One Anymore.

John Adams called jury trials part of the "heart and lungs of liberty." Today, defendants are often punished for exercising that very right.

BILLY BINION
7.4.2022

What is the Sixth Amendment?

You wouldn't be blamed for having to consult Google to answer that question. The Founders are rolling in their graves anyway.

It's the right to a trial by jury, and it's one that society has all but disposed of—despite the Framers' insistence that it be included in the Bill of Rights as one of the primary bulwarks against government tyranny.

They didn't exactly mince words. "Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty," wrote John Adams. "Without them we have no fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs."

One wonders what animalistic metaphors Adams would conjure today if he could see the U.S. criminal justice system in motion: one in which about 97 percent of trials are resolved without juries, devoid of the sacrosanct lifeblood that keeps human liberty from death by suffocation.

That tool has been supplanted by the plea bargain. In popular culture, that's widely seen as advantageous to defendants. In reality, it's been disastrous. It epitomizes government coercion. It epitomizes what the Founders warned against.

That's because the places where we're accustomed to seeing the criminal legal system play out—on shows like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit—can't and don't account for how plea "deals" often work in practice. The bulk of a prosecutor's job is not spent in the hallowed halls of a courtroom participating in a high-stakes battle over someone's liberty, all while journalists wait in the wings to capture the victor's speech on marble steps. It's spent in backrooms, with district attorneys "charge-stacking," or filing multiple criminal charges against someone for the same offense, calculating a grisly potential prison sentence, and offering to make some of that go away—so long as the defendant in question does not exercise his or her constitutional right to a trial by jury.

If they refuse, then they will risk a substantially higher time behind bars, not because a prosecutor views it as necessary for public safety but because he or she dared to inconvenience them with a trial. After all, what the defendant is accused of didn't change. But trials are expensive. And the government can never be sure when it will win, so better to avoid them where possible.

That latter part—the uncertainty—is supposed to be the point. It's true that many criminal defendants are guilty. It's also true that some are innocent and have been forced to pay with their liberty anyway. A person who is not guilty likely wants to go to trial. But why risk a decade behind bars for insisting on your Sixth Amendment right when you could be out in two or three?

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Source:  https://reason.com/2022/07/04/the-founders-loved-jury-trials-almost-no-one-gets-one-anymore/

[corbe]

   She could talk me into a plea bargin anytime.

   Seriously, The Judicial System is a product of the people who run it and only naturally they want to maximize expediency and Profit ~ Lawyers.
   They aren't necessarily stupid or evil people, but necessary, at important times in this Life Cycle.

[Kamaji]

   She could talk me into a plea bargin anytime.

   Seriously, The Judicial System is a product of the people who run it and only naturally they want to maximize expediency and Profit ~ Lawyers.
   They aren't necessarily stupid or evil people, but necessary, at important times in this Life Cycle.

More specifically, prosecutors.

[corbe]

    Certainly, a valid point @Kamaji obviously you miss the ol days.

[Kamaji]

    Certainly, a valid point @Kamaji obviously you miss the ol days.

It's a difficult question.  Clearly, on the one hand, a reasonable plea bargaining process allows the courts to proceed in an efficient manner; however, just as clearly, on the other hand, the plea bargaining system becomes a monstrous abortion of justice once prosecutors begin to use it in bad faith.

Finding the middle ground, where obvious cases can be handled expeditiously for all concerned, while still preserving the jury trial as an important element of substantive justice, is the hard part.

[jmyrlefuller]

The "quick and speedy trial" is also a Constitutional right.

[corbe]

   


They're all Lawyers pleading for some 'Semblance of Justice'

[GtHawk]

I learned about this decades ago in traffic court, DA's don't push plea deals to promote justice they push them to promote themselves. Every time a DA talks someone into a plea deal they get to chalk it up as a conviction in their record, or so it was explained to me.

[jmyrlefuller]

I learned about this decades ago in traffic court, DA's don't push plea deals to promote justice they push them to promote themselves. Every time a DA talks someone into a plea deal they get to chalk it up as a conviction in their record, or so it was explained to me.

Yep.

Four years ago I was in a city near me and a councilman's wife rammed into my rear bumper while I was backing out of a parking spot. I was the one charged with "unsafe backing," which if convicted would have been a moving violation on my license. When I got to court I was offered the plea deal of taking a parking ticket, which I could pay on my way out and wouldn't count as a moving violation.

It was all about a quick buck for the city.

I wanted to fight it, because I wasn't in the wrong, but because it was my first time dealing with the system, I was talked into taking the plea deal.

Not long after that I got a notice that I had been rejected for the jobs I had applied to with the postal service, which required a clean driving record. Whether it was a coincidence or not, I don't know. But that accident ended up showing up on my background check.

[Kamaji]

I learned about this decades ago in traffic court, DA's don't push plea deals to promote justice they push them to promote themselves. Every time a DA talks someone into a plea deal they get to chalk it up as a conviction in their record, or so it was explained to me.

That is the case.  A guilty result is a conviction, whether obtained through a plea deal, or from a jury's decision in a contested criminal litigation.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

   She could talk me into a plea bargin anytime.

   Seriously, The Judicial System is a product of the people who run it and only naturally they want to maximize expediency and Profit ~ Lawyers.
   They aren't necessarily stupid or evil people, but necessary, at important times in this Life Cycle.

Gee, so the Judicial, Congressional and Executive Department are all run by lawyers?

No wonder so many love a non-lawyer like Reagan and Trump to run things.

Coincidence?

[Smokin Joe]

One wonders what animalistic metaphors Adams would conjure today if he could see the U.S. criminal justice system in motion: one in which about 97 percent of trials are resolved without juries, devoid of the sacrosanct lifeblood that keeps human liberty from death by suffocation.

i think Adams might describe a lively circular goat-breeding operation.