Opinion ID: 1791862
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 10

Heading: Fundamental Significance of Right to Jury Trial

Text: All of this discussion is subsumed, of course, under the issue of whether Ring is a decision of fundamental significance. In short, whether you apply the plain meaning test or the Stovall/Linkletter analysis, it remains apparent that Ring is of fundamental significance. In denying Ring's significance, the majority simply refuses to acknowledge that our Witt analysis, unlike the federal analysis in Teague, is equally concerned with important issues of process. It is one thing for a Teague analysis, which openly disfavors retroactive application of procedural changes in the law, to come to such a conclusion; but it is quite another for this Court to reject our express concerns in Witt with both substantive and procedural changes in the law. In its failure to recognize the importance of process under Witt, the majority also fundamentally misperceives the values this country was founded upon and ignores hundreds of years of our unique legal traditions. The right to a jury trial is not only recognized as the most important right involving our justice system set out in our constitution, its roots rest in the most revered legal document of our Anglo-American legal tradition, the Magna Carta. Countless thousands of English and American patriots have recognized and defended the right of jury trial as the very foundation of our justice system. In 1762, David Hume, the English philosopher, wrote that trial by jury is the best institution calculated for the preservation of liberty and the administration of justice that was ever devised by the wit of man. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson declared in 1788, I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution. See J. Kendall Few, In Defense of Trial by Jury 214, 311, American Jury Trial Foundation (1993). Of course, Apprendi and Ring say the same thing. Indeed, this Court's first chief justice, Chief Justice Douglas, eloquently assessed the importance of this right in 1848 when he spoke for a unanimous Court in declaring: When however it is remembered with what jealous and scrupulous regard the right of trial by jury has ever been cherished and preserved by our Anglo Saxon ancestors, and by the Fathers of the revolution of 1776, a regard transmitted to us their descendants not only with unabated attachment, but if possible with increased interest and regard  a Magna Charta shielding every one in the enjoyment of life liberty and property: When these things are borne in mind and a Legislative act in its terms abridges this hallowed right, or its provisions are subversive of the principles of natural justice and against common reason and common right, the duty of the court, though unpleasant and even painful, is too obvious to be doubted or denied. Flint River Steam Boat Co. v. Roberts, Allen & Co., 2 Fla. 102, 115 (1848). One can only wonder as to what our Founding Fathers and Chief Justice Douglas would say about this Court's failure today to recognize the fundamental importance of the right to a trial by jury in our American society. In discussing the right to a jury trial as one only involving mere technical procedural rights, the majority clearly misses the point that we have adopted a procedural system of justice in this country (often referred to as an adversarial system), that relies upon procedural safeguards to insure just results. As the majority opinion in Blakely explains: Ultimately, our decision cannot turn on whether or to what degree trial by jury impairs the efficiency or fairness of criminal justice. One can certainly argue that both these values would be better served by leaving justice entirely in the hands of professionals; many nations of the world, particularly those following civil-law traditions, take just that course. There is not one shred of doubt, however, about the Framers' paradigm for criminal justice: not the civil-law ideal of administrative perfection, but the common-law ideal of limited state power accomplished by strict division of authority between judge and jury. As Apprendi held, every defendant has the right to insist that the prosecutor prove to a jury all facts legally essential to the punishment. Under the dissenters' alternative, he has no such right. That should be the end of the matter. Blakely v. Washington, 124 S.Ct. at 2543 (emphasis added). Nowhere does the majority confront the nature of our justice system and its fundamental reliance on process to obtain a just outcome. In other words, unlike the civil jurisdictions in Europe and elsewhere, our guarantee of justice rests virtually entirely upon the procedural safeguards we have put in place. The guarantee of these safeguards and due process provides the foundation for the Rule of Law in this country and its placement in our federal constitution was virtually demanded by our citizens in the very first session of the U.S. Congress. The right to trial by jury is perhaps the most important ingredient in that foundation and the due process we have guaranteed our citizens, and the opinions in Apprendi, Ring, and Blakely make that clear. Witt, of course, mandates that we recognize decisions of fundamental significance affecting the judicial process.