The Sixth Amendment or…

…Speedy Trials My Ass

Veritas Omnia Vincit is back, again gracing the pages of TAH with his articles on the US Constitution. Today his Article of choice is the Sixth, as you may have gathered from his rather tongue-in-cheek title. Enough intro, here’s VOV:

Veritas Omnia Vincit

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affords criminal defendants seven discrete personal liberties:
(1) the right to a speedy trial;
(2) the right to a public trial;
(3) the right to an impartial jury;
(4) the right to be informed of pending charges;
(5) the right to confront and to cross-examine adverse witnesses;
(6) the right to compel favorable witnesses to testify at trial through the subpoena power of the judiciary; and
(7) the right to legal counsel.

Ratified in 1791, the Sixth Amendment originally applied only to criminal actions brought by the federal government.

Once again an amendment with a great many sub-components restricting government to act within a set framework that our government routinely ignores with little or no consequence. Also because of the complex nature of this particular amendment most of our fellow Americans don’t seem to care the government is unable to comply with the simple restrictions outlined in this amendment.

The first provision is so routinely ignored as to be damn near null and void these days….if you spend any time in a courthouse and find out that some poor bastard who was sentenced to 90 days is being released because he was held for 120 days while unable to make bail you start to wonder what the hell kind of “justice” we are actually meting out to many of those we find subject to the whims of the government over these smaller offenses. As with many Americans I suspect a great many think, “So what? These are criminals and so what if they serve more time than the crime for which they are being prosecuted has established as punishment in our legal code?” Well for me, and others, this routine of being held for months when you can make bail because of court back logs over minor incidents establishes a precedent that the government’s inability to make a case and bring it to trial in any sort of “speedy” fashion negates its obligations under the Constitution and once again represents an incursion or encroachment on the perimeters of our natural rights. These small incursions add up across all the amendments and represent a threat to all of us from our own government when our government decides it’s perfectly acceptable to consider waiting 3-6 months to prosecute a minor infraction against an individual who’s being held in lockup for a crime that carries a sentence of 30-60 days a “speedy” trial. It starts to render the language of the law meaningless. If speedy can mean months and months of waiting, just wait until we get to excessive fines and asset forfeiture…

The right to a public trial, for the most part this remains intact with well-known exceptions that are perhaps acceptable to most of us. Protecting minor victims’ identities, people’s safety in trials using RICO statutes to cripple organized crime, perhaps those are acceptable reasons for less public access, perhaps they are not. There is still a healthy debate over whether or not the right of the public to see what is happening in its justice system outweighs any one individual’s privacy as a party to such trials. Also in the areas of classified information there is a concern that the government can easily lock out the public over “national security” concerns that are actual security concerns but simply a mechanism to allow the state to punish whistleblowers in private without the public seeing the corruption of the system.

The right to an impartial jury, the old jury of your peers concept. This really means just members of the community who don’t know you and have no personal interest in the business at hand. It is unfortunate that so many people work so hard to avoid jury duty and that our government has done such a shitty job of making the public interested in serving as the watchdogs that juries are supposed to be over government powers. In the Baystate we’ve at least set up a mandatory payroll compensation system where folks called to jury duty are covered for their wages in full by their employers as a component of jury service. Our system is also a simple one day or one trial system. If we were truly serious about it however we would make our laws such that no one serving on a jury was ever subjected to lost wages for simply performing a civic duty that is required. People on longer trials lasting weeks often face lost wages as there are no universal requirements for the government or business to pay anyone missing from work for jury duty for months on end. This creates a system where people do as much as possible to legally avoid serving, and if they are still unable to avoid serving once the arguments of both sides are over these folks are more interested in a speedy resolution just to get back to making a living as opposed to serving the needs of justice. We the people aren’t aware of how powerful we are in the jury box. We consequently fail to exercise that power in a meaningful manner with any regularity. It is the one place we can exercise jury nullification, an opportunity for the public to express its concern that certain laws are inherently unjust, that prosecutors are biased or acting on a personal vendetta, or they simply feel the punishment for what’s been done is out of proportion to the act. Sometimes jury nullification takes place simply because people believe the government should not prosecute certain cases, such as has actually happened when the parent of a child victim murders the child’s predator. This is one of the most important tools we possess to vacate the government’s power, and one we rarely use to full effect.

The right to be informed of charges is pretty straightforward, in England there were times when prisoners were held without knowing why until such time as their trials commenced creating a decided lack of ability to properly prepare one’s defense.

The right to confront your accusers and cross-examine adverse witnesses along with being able to use the power of subpoena to compel a favorable witness with the assistance of counsel round out the seven concepts in this amendment and are all the result of framers wishing to create a system entirely different, and thus theoretically more fair in concept than what they had seen from the English and Europe in general at that time.

In establishing the role of judges as arbiters of points of law they hoped to create a far more robust adversarial process. In England and Continental Europe of their day magistrates were part of the inquisition process and took major roles in finding evidence, framing the legal issues and even questioning witnesses. In contrast the framers built a system where each side was left to do that on its own without participation from the judge. This was intended, and we’ve all seen it in action, to allow the judge to defy the government on behalf of the people and rule certain government evidence, practices, or procedures inadmissible at certain points in certain trials.

When we consider the small encroachments on the sixth amendment, or large depending on your own experiences, we are once again reminded that the government will never willingly work to protect the rights of the people and honor the restrictions placed on the government by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The government will always work to consolidate and increase its power over its citizens and pass ever more laws to be able to exert that control. There are very few examples of government removing obsolete laws or laws that are inherently immoral or unjust. There is a reason every now and again that certain papers publish the laws that remain on the books from over a hundred years ago that bear no practical application in today’s society yet have not been expunged from the legal code.

Ayn Rand (I know many consider her a nut, with good reason. Even a nut however can be accurate about certain observations as I feel she was in this case.) once said, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
It’s good to remember that quote when considering how our government encroaches on our freedoms. While the sixth is not the sexiest amendment it’s a powerful one with many restrictions against Government, some of which are routinely ignored today. We must remain ever vigilant lest we lose more and more of these protections of our rights by continuing to vote to dismantle government instead of increase it. Right now the left and the right love big government, for different reasons perhaps but neither the left nor the right are doing anything to decrease government. They all wish to utilize government to exercise their versions of control over the rest of us. We ignore that reality at our own peril.

Thanks for reading, let me know your thoughts.
VoV

Ahh, VOV, shouldn’t that be “alleged criminal defendants?”
*grin*

Category: America, Guest Post, Legal, The Constitution