Court Opinion

ID: 9531465
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:11:42.861161+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:28:28.883433
License: Public Domain

BRAY, J.
I reluctantly concur because of the many cases narrowly construing article I, section 7 of the Constitution. The right to jury trial is one of the most important and valuable rights guaranteed to a citizen and should not be denied. However, when, as here, it is obvious that everyone at the trial, judge, counsel and the defendant, assumed that a trial by jury had been waived, and the plaintiff’s counsel and the defendant and his counsel proceeded to trial before the judge and without calling the court’s attention to the error, it seems to me that a reasonable interpretation of their acts is that the jury was waived “by the consent of both parties, expressed in open court by the defendant and his counsel ...” No one is more anxious than I to protect the rights of a defendant who has been forced to a trial without a jury or who unknowing of his rights or through inadvertence, has consented to a trial without a jury. But society itself needs some protection from a defendant who, as here, was content to be tried (and his lawyer was content to have him tried) by the judge until he found the judge’s decision adverse to him, and then for the first time calls attention to the fact that he had not formally waived a jury trial. To hold that the language of the Constitution was not met by the action of all concerned, is as technical and unrealistic as the holding in People v. Aro, 6 Cal. 207, 208 [65 Am. Dec. 503], where although the indictment charged that the *705accused did “with a Colt’s pistol and dirk-knife, willfully, feloniously, and with malice aforethought, kill, murder, and do to death one (name unknown) a Chinaman,” the court held the indictment defective because it contained no “statement that the deceased came to his death by the wounds inflicted ...” (P. 209.)
A reappraisement of the meaning of article I, section 7 should be made so that it is impossible for a defendant and his lawyer to cause a judicial farce, as here.
Respondent’s petition for a hearing by the Supreme Court was denied May 9, 1956.