The New York Times notices that jury trials are disappearing.
Jury Trials Vanish, and Justice is Served Behind Closed Doors
The criminal trial ended more than two and a half years ago, but Judge Jesse M. Furman can still vividly recall the case. It stands out, not because of the defendant or the subject matter, but because of its rarity: In his four-plus years on the bench in Federal District Court in Manhattan, it was his only criminal jury trial.
He is far from alone.
Judge J. Paul Oetken, in half a decade on that bench, has had four criminal trials, including one that was repeated after a jury deadlocked. For Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who has handled some of the nation’s most important terrorism cases, it has been 18 months since his last criminal jury trial.
Recall what I wrote here:
Here is the thing that few people understand, I imagine: What goes on in court is, overwhelmingly, merely the ratification by the judge of deals already worked-out between the accused and the district attorney; actual television-like trials are relatively rare and, though absolutely a right, not actually welcome. They, you know, get in the way of, and slow down, the important work of dispensing justice.
Your day in court lasts about 10-minutes, if it’s a complicated matter, and is not really public at all. Yes, a passerby — me, for example — can go in and sit down, and watch and take notes, but all that happens is that the judge approves deals that have already been settled — and everybody involved will claim an ethical duty of silence. The approval of the deals is public; the working-out of justice is not. That might as well occur on Mars.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I am certain the biggest contributor to our production-line style of justice is the so-called War on Drugs. We need to be done once for all with the pious backward-looking yahoos and get serious about running a modern country that works.