Court Opinion

ID: 9581331
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:13:51.471706+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:36:51.924713
License: Public Domain

Harshbarger, Justice,

dissenting:

The majority opinion illustrates what I perceive to be a rather pervasive tendency in our legal climate today, to deny jury trial rights whenever possible, thereby limiting citizen participation in the dispute resolution function of government at nearly every turn.
One wonders why this phenomenon is occurring. Is there within judicial minds a dislike for the intrusion upon the good order of processes that laymen participation in the system may seem to present? Is there an economic reason to limit the rights? Are we simply “status quoers”, caught by inertia in our comfortable ways of doing things, loath to change?
Why would a court spend such excellent scholarship as ours has here, to keep from finding that people who are threatened with loss of their personal liberty are entitled to a judgment by their fellow citizens upon the question of the propriety of the governmental action. So what if the English did or did not give accused lunatics jury trials? Is there really much sanctity in English law as it existed at the very time we as a people were shooting Englishmen because we were distressed by the way their government was denying us civil rights?
We as a court should not hesitate an instant to demand jury trials for everyone who is about to be denied freedom. Who, for goodness sake, would be harmed.
When I read my Brother Miller’s opinion I was captured by the soldierly progress through the ages, of authority after authority upon the point that this or that court has not extended the right to jury trial to this *67miscreant or that rascal, to such — and—such class of minor criminal. But then I realized that what all these courts, and ours, were doing was justifying not allowing peer judgment to be interposed between a government and its citizens, to test facts upon which government proposed to act to the citizens’ detriment.
What is so terrible about juries that we must protect the workings of the state from them? Well, of course there is nothing terrible about them. It is only troublesome to empanel juries. And whether some English court, or some United States Supreme Court, thought it not legally necessary merely reflects their bent to allow the government to lock people away by official action sans lay participation. I do not like that. I think that broadening of protections to liberty, which I believe are best guarded by the sunshine of lay people’s judgments about their fellows, should be our main effort. I believe that we just simply should not become so welded to the traditional rules that we become blinded to ways to improve and expand protections of freedom that are available to us. And there is no better repository than the jury, of the liberty rights of the people.
If our constitution’s phrase, that no one shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law and the judgment of his peers, has always been held not to mean what it says, I can think of no better time than now to overrule such precedents.
To say, as we have in the first syllabus, that the phrase “cannot be interpreted to require a constitutional right to a jury trial...”, is really preposterous. Because that is precisely what it does; and what this court has done is to scholarize the great right to death, rather than grant it growth.
If one re-reads the opinion, one cannot escape the sense of not only this but other courts’ agony about “extending” jury trial rights. We and they have certainly fought that hideous prospect!
Justice McGraw joins me in this dissent.