Courts suppress fifth, sixth seventh amendment rights

I earlier posted my misagreement about cellphones Allen County Legal Experts go Technical bans cellphones being so disruptive to the orderly flow of things in the temples, better known as courtrooms. I was stating the fact that few trials are held in the courthouse as I stated so in this post Safety-Cellphones-Snitches-Safety? and the ban was just the judicial folks flexing their muscles. And another post To Snitch or not to Snitch sharing my experience as a criminal investigator, and my mode of operation in getting defendants to contact their lawyers before agreeing to sign a plea agreement.

Today, Indiana Law blog has an article about how few trials are held compared to the number of cases that are filed. The reason why is because trials involved the public and can be costly as well as time consuming. The attorneys and judges have more control in plea bargaining. But that's my opinion. But the writer provides data supporting my opinion, today 1.3 percent of trials in the federal court as compared to 11.5 percent back in 1962.

We’ve moved in a way to a more European way of decision-making, by looking at the court file rather than through encounters with living witnesses whose testimony is tested by cross-examination,” Professor Galanter said.

In criminal cases, the vast majority of prosecutions end in plea bargains. In an article called “Vanishing Trials, Vanishing Juries, Vanishing Constitution” in the Suffolk University Law Review last year, a federal judge questioned the fairness of the choices confronting many criminal defendants.

Those who have the temerity to “request the jury trial guaranteed them under the U.S. Constitution,” wrote the judge, William G. Young of the Federal District Court in Boston, face “savage sentences” that can be five times as long as those meted out to defendants who plead guilty and cooperate with the government.

The movement away from jury trials is not just a societal reallocation of resources or a policy choice. Rather, as Judge 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.

The writer writes:

I was on jury duty last week, in a state criminal court in Manhattan. During the orientation on Wednesday, a court officer, with mixed pride and hyperbole, said his was the busiest courthouse in America.
I never saw so much as the inside of a courtroom. After a couple of days of milling around in an assembly room with more than 100 other potential jurors, the State of New York thanked us for our service and sent us home.

. I added bold for emphasis. What I found funny about the article is what I suggested the tax payer do go visit the courtrooms and you would see how they are not busy with trials in the temples. The writer confirmed what I stated in my earlier article.

Note one of BlackProf's blog contributors, Paul Butler, is quoted in the article.