A Stitch in Haste

Most people know that the Sixth Amendment guarantees a trial by jury in criminal cases. What you may not know is that the Supreme Court has, over time, carved out an evolving de minimus exception to that rule. The current case law holds that if the potential sentence is less than six months in jail, then the defendant is not entitled to a trial by jury (see Baldwin v. New York, 399 U.S. 66 (1970). (States are free, of course, to grant greater guarantees if they so choose.)

Okay fine, I can live with all that.

But what irritates me is when carve-outs to the carve-outs are crafted for no other reason than to save a buck:

Prosecutors and Municipal Court judges in Arizona are pushing to eliminate the right to a jury trial for misdemeanor drunken-driving charges in the wake of an Arizona Supreme Court decision [narrowing the de minimus exception].

While the ruling addressed misdemeanors in general, prosecutors and judges across the state rushed to test whether it could be interpreted as a mandate for DUI trials to take place exclusively before a judge and not a jury.
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The reasons to prefer a bench trial instead of a jury trial are simple: time and money.

“Sometimes we prepare for a jury trial, and at the last minute, the defendant wants to plead before the court,” said Mary Stringer, magistrate in Bullhead City Court. “So we have all the jurors on standby, and the logistics of it are very often time-consuming.”
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The main obstacle to moving to bench trials exclusively is a state statute that explicitly grants jury trials in DUI cases. At question now is whether that statute is moot.

Most DUI offenses are misdemeanors and involve motorists driving under the influence of drugs or with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08 percent or more or, in the case of an extreme DUI, 0.15 percent or more.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I am not as uppity about DUI laws as most libertarians. But I am very uppity about the proper functions of government, one of which is to have a fully-funded and adequately-staffed judicial system. With all the taxing and spending that government does, at all levels, the notion that “juries are too expensive” is outrageous and shameful.

As I blogged previously:

We can afford every pork-barrel program imaginable for every two-bit senator and representative, we can have marginal income tax rates that would have made the Founders vomit, but we can’t afford courts? Along with police and defense, courts are the only inarguably proper functions of government. The notion that government is “too busy doing other things” to afford an optimal court system is the sort of drivel I might expect from an underachieving high school student… There is something wrong, fundamentally wrong, with such a perspective…

(And, as a side note, make no mistake about it — judges convict more often in DUI trials than juries do; the article discusses that as well.)

If you want to jump into the Bramble Bush of whether juries can’t “do the job” anymore, or that unbiased jury pools simply cannot be found anymore, or that the deadweight loss from pulling people out of their jobs outweighs the benefits of the lay jury system, then fine, be my guest. Legitimate arguments on all those points can certainly be made. But don’t dare say that, from the perspective of the court system itself, juries “cost too much.” That way madness lies.

Arizona has every right to craft its jury policy however it sees fit within constitutional strictures. But the decision should be based on fairness and common sense, not the price tag.

POST SCRIPT: On a lighter note, John of Arkanssouri is having his own jury-system dilemma and asks a very good question of the Objectivists out there.

Related Posts:
Should We Move to Professional Jurors?
Your Parking Tickets At Work
Libertarianism on the Retreat!

Similar Posts:

• Britain May Abolish Some Jury Trials
• Chicago Judge: No All-White Juries
• On Juries Dumb and Smart
• The Jury is Still Out on Juries
• Suddenly Jury Nullification Doesn’t Sound So Great

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