Opinion ID: 2617650
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Constitutional Basis of the Vicinage Requirement.

Text: The California Constitution, although providing for the right to trial by jury, has never contained an express vicinage requirement. [6] The common law vicinage right to trial by jury selected from the vicinage or county is implied in the state Constitution. We so held in People v. Powell (1891) 87 Cal. 348 [25 P. 481], where the prosecutor in San Mateo County exercised a statutory right to change venue, over defendant's objection, to San Francisco County. We invalidated the statutory provision as violative of defendant's right under the state Constitution (former art. I, § 7) to be tried by a jury drawn from the vicinage, which in Blackstone's Commentaries (book 4, p. 350), is interpreted as the county where the crime was committed. (87 Cal. at pp. 354-360.) Hernandez, however, does not invoke the provisions of the California Constitution. Rather, he relies on the rights secured by the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments of the federal Constitution. The vicinage right is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment, which provides in pertinent part: 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, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law.... (4) The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees a right to trial by jury in all criminal cases which, were they to be tried in a federal court, would come within the Sixth Amendment's guaranty. ( Duncan v. Louisiana (1968) 391 U.S. 145, 149 [20 L.Ed.2d 491, 496, 88 S.Ct. 1444].) In Williams v. Florida, supra, 399 U.S. 78, the Supreme Court held that only essential features of the jury system were preserved in the Sixth Amendment and that the court must determine those features that are indispensable components of a jury under the Sixth Amendment by examining the function that the particular feature performs and its relation to the purposes of the jury trial. ( Id. at pp. 99-100 [26 L.Ed.2d at p. 460].) The right to be tried by a jury of the vicinage, the Supreme Court held, was an essential feature of jury trial, preserved, though redefined, by the Sixth Amendment. ( Ibid. ) In addition, the high court defined district, for Sixth Amendment purposes, as the federal judicial district. ( Id. at p. 96 [26 L.Ed.2d at p. 458].) (3b) Three years later, this court considered the vicinage requirement in the context of the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments and recognized that the federal Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant in a state trial the right to be tried by a jury selected from residents of the vicinage. ( Jones, supra, 9 Cal.3d 546, 556.) Our holding today  that there is no violation of the vicinage requirement when a criminal defendant is tried in Los Angeles County by a jury drawn from Los Angeles County  is consistent with the historical development of the Sixth Amendment and subsequent decisions of the United States Supreme Court. The impetus for the vicinage requirement and the rationale for its inclusion within the Sixth Amendment do not support a more restrictive definition of vicinage. Jurors are no longer permitted, let alone required, to possess personal knowledge of the crime; our citizens are no longer threatened with transportation across the seas for criminal trials. Transformations in our government as well as in our society make clear that narrowly interpreting the vicinage requirement is no longer warranted.