Times: Trial by jury on verge of extinction, democracy at risk

Raw Story
Monday, April 30, 2007

According to a story in tomorrow's New York Times (reg. req.), trials by jury are "on the verge of extinction" and are being "replaced by settlements and plea deals, by mediations and arbitrations and by decisions from judges." In fact, "only 1.3 percent of federal civil cases ended in trials last year, down from 11.5 percent in 1962."

The Times points out in particular that "in criminal cases, the vast majority of prosecutions end in plea bargains" and quotes a judge as complaining that defendents "who have the temerity to 'request the jury trial guaranteed them under the U.S. Constitution' ... face 'savage sentences' that can be five times as long as those meted out to defendants who plead guilty and cooperate with the government."

Excerpts:

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The trends in criminal cases and in the state courts are broadly similar, though not always quite as striking. But it is beyond dispute that even as the number of lawyers has grown twice as fast as the population and even as the number of lawsuits has exploded, actual trials have become quite rare.

Instead of hearing testimony, ruling on objections and instructing jurors on the law, judges spend most of their time supervising the exchange of information, deciding pretrial motions and dealing with settlements and plea bargains.

The movement away from jury trials is not just a societal reallocation of resources or a policy choice. Rather, as Young put it, it represents a disavowal of "the most stunning and successful experiment in direct popular sovereignty in all history."

Indeed, juries were central to the framers of the Constitution, who guaranteed the right to a jury trial in criminal cases, and to the drafters of the Bill of Rights, who referred to juries in the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Amendments. Jury trials may be expensive and time-consuming, but the jury, local and populist, is a counterweight to central authority and is as important an element in the constitutional balance as the two houses of Congress, the three branches of government and the federal system itself.