page_title: Vicinage Clause
section_title: House
hierarchical_section_title: Vicinage Clause / Drafting of the Clause / House
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of James Madison, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, and the fourth President of the United States
context_page_description: The Vicinage Clause is a provision in the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution regulating the vicinity from which a jury pool may be selected. The clause says that the accused shall be entitled to an "impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law". The Vicinage Clause limits the vicinity of criminal jury selection to both the state and the federal judicial district where the crime has been committed. This is distinct from the venue provision of Article Three of the United States Constitution, which regulates the location of the actual trial.
  The Vicinage clause has its roots in medieval English criminal procedure, the perceived abuses of criminal vicinage and venue during the colonial period and Anti-federalist objections to the United States Constitution. The clause is one of the few constitutional criminal procedure provisions that has not been incorporated to apply to proceedings in state courts, the other being the Grand Jury Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
context_section_description: James Madison's (A-VA) original draft of the jury provision of the Sixth Amendment provided: 
  The trial of all crimes (except in cases of impeachment, and cases arising in the land or naval forces, or the militia when on actual service, in time of war or public danger) shall be by an impartial jury of freeholders of the vicinage, with the requisite of unanimity for conviction, of the right of challenge, and other accustomed requisites . . . provided that in cases of crimes committed within any county which may be in possession of an enemy, or in which a general insurrection may prevail, the trial may by law be authorized in some other county of the same state, as near as may be to the seat of the offence.
  Madison intended this language to replace Article Three, Section Two, Clause Three, rather than be appended to the Constitution. The Committee of Eleven of the House amended Madison's language as follows:
  The trial of all crimes (except in cases of impeachment, and in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia when on actual service in the time of war, or public danger,) shall be by an impartial jury of freeholders of the vicinage, with the requisite of unanimity for conviction, the right of challenge, and other accustomed requisites . . . . [B]ut if a crime be committed in a place in the possession of an enemy, or in which an insurrection may prevail, the indictment and trial may by law be authorized in some other place within the same State; and if it be committed in a place not within a state, the indictment and trial may be at such place or places as the law may have directed.
  Aedanus Burke (A-SC) proposed that "vicinage" be replaced by "district or county in which the offence has been committed." Richard Henry Lee (A-VA) argued that "vicinage" was better, "it being a term well understood by every gentleman of legal knowledge." Rep. Burke's amendment was defeated. As amended by the Committee of Eleven, this language passed the House. The Committee of Three, undertaking the task of transforming the amendments to the body of the Constitution into a separate Bill of Rights, moved the language to Article X and deleted the language concerning crimes not committed within a state.
caption: James Madison both defended the absence of a vicinage provision in the Constitution and pushed for more stringent vicinage language in the Sixth Amendment.
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