Opinion ID: 2617650
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Heading: Historical Development of the Vicinage Requirement.

Text: The vicinage requirement is derived from English common law and American colonial history. Early English judicial practice required that juries be drawn from the neighborhood where the crime occurred, as jurors were expected to reach a determination based upon their personal knowledge of the facts. (See Heller, The Sixth Amendment, supra, p. 95.) Although English juries evolved into bodies to hear the evidence, and previous knowledge became a principal cause for rejecting jurors, jurors nevertheless continued to be drawn from the vicinity of the crime. (See Kershen, Vicinage (1976) 26 Okla.L.Rev. 803, 813 (hereafter Vicinage ).) The concept of trial by the jury of the vicinage was not brought to the American colonies in any absolute form. ( Zicarelli v. Gray (3d Cir.1976) 543 F.2d 466, 475.) The practice of drawing petit jurors from the vicinity of the crime was not uniform within the colonies. (See Vicinage, supra, 26 Okla.L.Rev. at p. 814.) However, the principle of trial by a jury of the vicinage gained vitality as a political argument of the American Revolution in response to Parliament's enactment of a series of laws permitting trial in England of crimes of treason committed in the colonies. ( Id. at pp. 806-807, 814.) In Williams v. Florida (1970) 399 U.S. 78 [26 L.Ed.2d 446, 90 S.Ct. 1893], the high court reviewed the legislative history behind the passage of the Sixth Amendment. We quote at length from Williams: [P]ending and after the adoption of the Constitution, fears were expressed that Article III's provision failed to preserve the common-law right to be tried by a `jury of the vicinage.' That concern, as well as the concern to preserve the right to jury in civil as well as criminal cases, furnished part of the impetus for introducing amendments to the Constitution that ultimately resulted in the jury trial provisions of the Sixth and Seventh Amendments. As introduced by James Madison in the House, the Amendment relating to jury trial in criminal cases would have provided that: `The trial of all crimes ... 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....' The Amendment passed the House in substantially this form, but after more than a week of debate in the Senate it returned to the House considerably altered.... As reported in a second letter by Madison on September 23, 1789, the Senate remained opposed to the vicinage requirement, partly because in its view the then-pending judiciary bill  which was debated at the same time as the Amendments  adequately preserved the common-law vicinage feature, making it unnecessary to freeze that requirement into the Constitution. `The Senate,' wrote Madison: `are ... inflexible in opposing a definition of the locality of Juries. The vicinage they contend is either too vague or too strict a term; too vague if depending on limits to be fixed by the pleasure of the law, too strict if limited to the county....' The version that finally emerged from the Committee was the version that ultimately became the Sixth Amendment.... Gone were the provisions spelling out such common-law features of the jury as `unanimity,' or `the accustomed requisites.' And the `vicinage' requirement itself had been replaced by wording that reflected a compromise between broad and narrow definitions of that term, and that left Congress the power to determine the actual size of the `vicinage' by its creation of judicial districts. ( Id. at pp. 93-96 [26 L.Ed.2d at pp. 456-458], fns. omitted.)