America


tenced to eight years in prison for stab- bing a drug informant in the arm. She was convicted by six jurors. In their 22-page SCOTUS writ, Paul


Petillo and Carey Haughwout argued a six-person jury, unless agreed to by the defendant, infringes upon the consti- tutional rights to a trial by an impartial jury provided by the Sixth and Four- teenth Amendments, because six, they wrote “is not enough to adequately rep- resent a defendant’s peers.” They drew from a litany of sources


Smaller Juries Erode Faith in Legal System


States are moving to six-person panels to save money and clear court backlogs.


T BY ALICE GIORDANO


he saying “i’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by six” no longer applies in Amer- ica with the growing and con-


troversial practice of using six-person juries to decide civil and criminal cases. The ramifi cations are far reaching,


Paula L. Hannaford-Agor, the Direc- tor of the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), tells Newsmax Magazine. The ultimate concern is that smaller


juries undermine confi dence in ver- dicts.


“The more diverse the jury is, the


more confi dence the public has that the jury got it right,” she said. There are now seven states using six-


or, in some cases, eight-person juries in an eff ort to clear court backlogs quicker — and save money. Other states are con- sidering adopting the practice. While the practice has been in place


for 20 years, it picked up momentum post-COVID-19. Diffi culty fi lling juries has also bol- stered their practice.


20 NEWSMAX | DECEMBER 2024 A shortage of jurors for an upcoming


criminal trial in North Hero, Vermont, recently led to a superior court judge ordering the local sheriff ’s department to set up a roadblock outside the court- house to haul in passing drivers to fi ll the jury pool. “It was certainly a fi rst for me,”


Grand Isle County Sheriff Ray Allen told Newsmax Magazine. Jury experts like Hannaford-Agor


believe that juries smaller than 12 can- not meet the constitutional rights for defendants to be tried by a proper rep- resentation of their peers. A study by her group shows that an


exiguous jury pool also leads to peer pressure within deliberations. “Dissenters in a larger jury may be


more likely to have an ally in the delib- eration room and may be better able to resist pressure to yield to the will of the larger group,” NCSC wrote in its assess- ment of the implications of jury size. Stuck in the middle of the debate is


that the Constitution doesn’t specify how large a jury should be. In May, the Supreme Court in an 8-1


ruling declined to hear a petition asking it to affi rm that 12-person juries were guaranteed under the Constitution. It was fi led by two West Palm Beach,


Florida, public defenders on behalf of Natoya Cunningham, who was sen-


to make their case. One was England’s 800-year-old Magna Carta — referenced by the U.S. Supreme Court in an 1898 ruling involving a stolen cow in Utah. In that case, SCOTUS concluded


that the 13th-century pact clearly infl u- enced America’s forefathers and that it had established the word “jury” to be “understood to mean a body of 12 people.” Petillo and Haughwout wrote, citing


the 126-year-old decision: “Given that understanding had been accepted since 1215, the Court reasoned, ‘[i]t must’ have been ‘that the word “jury”’ in the Sixth Amendment was ‘placed in the Consti- tution . . . with reference to [that] mean- ing affi xed to [it].’” While not mentioned in the Supreme


Court appeal, there is also a long-held belief the 12-person standard was based on the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. In the Florida case, the two pub-


lic defenders leaned on a number of studies, writing that all “indicate that 12-member juries deliberate longer, recall evidence better, and rely less on irrelevant factors during deliberation.” The argument only moved one of the


STATES USING SIX-MEMBER JURIES


FLORIDA ARIZONA INDIANA


CONNECTICUT UTAH


KENTUCKY MASSACHUSETTS


SCISSORS/WESTEND61/GETTY IMAGES / CHAIRS/IMAGINIMA©ISTOCK


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