Supreme Court Rewrites Constitutional Amendments
(www.wnd.com)
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I am not sure on this one. It seems that this is a question of tradition versus what is actually in the Constitution. It was a tradition that a jury consists of 12 people. It is not in the constitution as such.
I would imagine the slippery slope came into play here. Are there other constitutional disputes between the literal interpretation and traditions in effect at the time which would be affected by a ruling that the tradition of a 12 person jury establishes the Constitutional meaning of the term and thus defines the meaning of the right to a trial by jury?
The Constitution sets the term of President at 4 years but doesn't define what a year is. Would it be legal for the court to rule that a year means a year on Saturn, equal to 30 Earth years? No.
Same thing here. A jury means and meant 12 people. They didn't have to specify it because that was the universally understood plain meaning of the word.
So, I am aware and love the basis for the number 12. It's literally drawn from the number of disciples of Jesus. I love that.
The argument that 12 is an inviolable number is absurd, given that 12 is the law of the land in only 34 of the 50 states of our country.
https://www.ncsc.org/newsroom/at-the-center/2022/jury-size-does-it-matter#:~:text=The%2012%2Dperson%20jury%2C%20which,member%20juries%20for%20those%20trials.
Nothing in that article addresses the historical meaning of the word. Jury specifically and unambiguously meant 12 people in English common law at the time when the Founders put that word into the Constitution, as clearly documented in Blackstone. Do you agree that statutory construction should rely on original plain meaning, or are you a "living document" postmodernist?
I would refer you to the 1979 ruling - Burch v Louisiana. Here, the court established that a jury must be composed of at least 6 people and that a non-unanimous conviction by juries of less than 12 people is not valid.
I think you would find that the 6th amendment was written intentionally vague, because the original colonies were not in agreement as to the structure of their judicial system.
I do not know how far back 6 person juries go in the US, but it has been a while. Check this archive.org article from 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20150602210951/https://www.uscourts.gov/services-forms/jury-service/types-juries
At the end of the day, I think you are right based upon the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. It was based largely on this, that Louisiana's non-unanimous jury convictions were overturned. I am torn from a perspective of state sovereignty.