Opinion ID: 769960
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Constitutional Guarantees

Text: 10 The constitutional limits on where a criminal defendant can be brought to trial derive from two separate provisions of the Constitution and also from the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Article III requires that the trial of all Crimes . . . shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed. U.S. Const. art. III, 2, cl. 3. The Bill of Rights in the Sixth Amendment further clarifies the appropriate forum for venue, specifying that in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. Rule 18 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure codifies the constitutional command, stating that prosecution shall be had in a district in which the offense was committed. 11 It is worth a few words of historical background to describe how the constitutional provisions had their genesis. Among the most prominent reasons for the provisions were action taken by England that led up to the Revolution. By Royal Edict, American Colonists accused of treason against the Crown in Massachusetts Bay Colony were to be tried for that crime in England. Such royal order aroused passionate objection in the Colonies on behalf of those who were to be conveyed to a distant land to be tried before strangers without having witnesses available to testify to their innocence. See William Wirt Blume, The Place of Trial of Criminal Cases: Constitutional Vicinage and Venue, 43 Mich. L. Rev. 59, 64 (1944). The feeling of outrage was so strong that transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses is listed as one of the causes of the Revolution and is set forth in the Declaration of Independence. 12 Further, in early common law, actions were thought of as local or transitory. Local when the cause of action could not have occurred in any other place; transitory when it could have arisen in one or more places. The rule permitting plaintiff in the case of a transitory action to lay venue wherever he wanted to caused such hardship to defendants that it was decreed by statute in England that venue should be laid where the cause of action arose. See Roscoe Pound & Theodore F.T. Plucknett, History & System of the Common Law, 427-28 (3d ed. 1927). Our constitutional rule -- based on its history -- requires that venue be linked to the nature of the crime charged and where the acts constituting it took place, and that the accused not be subject to the hardship of being tried in a district remote from where the crime was committed. Hardship on a defendant has been somewhat mitigated by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 21(b) which provides a defendant with an opportunity to have the venue fixed by the prosecution transferred to another one for the convenience of parties and witnesses and in the interest of justice.