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Are you interested in handing out FIJA brochures outside of courthouses or doing other community outreach to create more fully informed jurors?
With the COVID-19 situation simmering down a bit, we have had an uptick of people interested in such efforts. In March, I quickly updated our training and scheduled a few dates for people to take our one-hour online volunteer training to meet a couple of specific requests. Since I didn't have as much time as I'd have liked to get the word out, we will be doing another set of these trainings coming up in May.
If you would like to participate, please take this short poll to help me determine the best days/times to accomodate as many people as possible. Once I have scheduled sessions based on your feedback, I'll be sharing registration info through FIJA's email list, on our website, and through our social media. If you join us for one of these live trainings, FIJA will send you a free t-shirt and starter materials to help kick off your outreach.
If you can't make one of the sessions, don't worry! I will be making a new video after these sessions to replace the current volunteer training we have on our YouTube channel with the updated training.
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Or at least so says Kevin Frazier, a fellow at the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at the U.C. Berkeley School of Law.
This article caught my eye because of his favorable comments on jury nullification (click through above to read those), but he also has three suggestions for increasing jury participation:
- better pay,
- more alternate jurors for each trial, and
- drawing prospective jurors from a bigger variety of sources.
What do you think of these ideas?
Personally, rather than adding more alternate jurors in trials that don't need them just to give more people a civics lesson, I'd prefer to see some remedies to the abusive plea bargaining process that makes it irrational in most cases for people to exercise their right to trial by jury. If more cases went to jury trial instead of being plea bargained at figurative gunpoint, not only would more jurors participate in the process, but they would do so meaningfully rather than as token extras.
Sadly, as our last link today indicates, that is not yet the direction that things are going.
A panel of three judges on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously overturned a trial judge's rejection of a plea bargain that required the accused to forfeit certain rights associated with the appeal process. First, they said that because the judge had a general practice to reject plea bargains containing such provisions, this constituted illegal "judicial participation" in plea negotiations above and beyond the judge's proper role in accepting or rejecting plea bargains. Second, the panel decided that the judge could only accept or reject a plea bargain if he states case-specific reasons and not just "abstract or extraneous policy considerations unrelated to the particular case".
Plea bargaining is a process not authorized by the Constitution, yet it has overwhelmingly come to be the dominant means by which criminal charges are adjudicated. As a result of almost nothing constraining their power, prosecutors have been able to almost entirely usurp the Constitutionally-prescribed role of the jury in such cases. And as I have repeatedly said, without trial by jury, there is no jury nullification. This is yet another ruling favoring a process not authorized by the Constitution over hat is supposed to be a Constitutionally guaranteed right.
Related bonus link:
The above article in the ABA Journal not only gives a fairly plain English summary of the ruling, but it also extensively quotes Professor of Law Carissa Byrne Hessick, author of Punishment without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal, on how inappropriate this particular ruling is.
