Suchergebnisse

Full-text available at SSRN. See link in this record. ; Some eight million citizens report for jury duty every year. Arguably, jury duty is one of the most significant opportunities to participate in the democratic process. For the accused, the jury acts as an indispensable safeguard against government overreaching. One might expect, therefore, that our justice system would treat putative jurors with care and tact. The opposite is true. During voir dire, potential jurors are required to share insights into their own lives, quirks, proclivities, and beliefs. Litigants have probed jurors' sexual orientation, criminal histories, criminal victimization, health, family relations, and beyond. A few scholars have chided the system for abusing jurors, but courts and scholars alike have conceived of this invasion into juror privacy as a necessary part of protecting the accused's Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights to fair trial and impartial jury and the media and public's First Amendment rights to observe the criminal process. In this article, I examine this overly-simplistic view, which fails to account for the probability that by infringing on juror privacy, the justice system causes more jurors to lie and to withhold material information revealing their true biases, thus undermining the accused's constitutional rights. Ultimately, I contend that juror privacy is an imperative complement to the accused's rights, and I urge a procedural modification to the voir dire process, a juror voir dire strike, protecting both jurors and the accused without undercutting the public's and media's First Amendment rights to observe criminal trials.

Across the country, states are grappling with how to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision in Miller v. Alabama, which held that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juveniles violate the Eighth Amendment. Following Miller, it appears a sentencer may impose life without parole on a juvenile homicide offender only in those rare instances in which the sentencer determines, after considering the mitigating qualities of youth, that the juvenile's crime reflects "irreparable corruption." Courts are preparing to conduct resentencing hearings in states nationwide, and new cases where juveniles face the possibility of life in prison are entering the courts. Yet courts and scholars have not addressed a fundamental question: Who is the sentencer? Can a judge decide that a particular juvenile should die in prison or does the Constitution give juveniles the right to require that a jury make that determination? Courts and state legislatures responding to Miller have assumed that a judge can impose life without parole on a juvenile, as long as the judge has discretion to impose a less severe sentence. But viewing Miller in light of the Supreme Court's recent Sixth Amendment jury right jurisprudence raises questions about the role of the jury in these post-Miller sentencing hearings. In particular, does an Eighth Amendment limit on a sentence operate in the same way as a statutory maximum sentence and set a ceiling that cannot be raised absent a jury finding? If so, a jury must find the facts beyond a reasonable doubt that expose a juvenile to life without parole. Understanding how the Court's recent Sixth and Eighth Amendment cases interact has broad implications for how sentencing authority is allocated not only in serious juvenile cases but also in our justice system more widely.