The Founders Loved Jury Trials. Almost No One Gets One Anymore.

John Adams called jury trials part of the “heart and lungs of liberty.” Today, defendants are often punished for exercising that very right.

What is the Sixth Amendment?

You wouldn’t be blamed for having to consult Google to answer that question. The Founders are rolling in their graves anyway.

It’s the right to a trial by jury, and it’s one that society has all but disposed of—despite the Framers’ insistence that it be included in the Bill of Rights as one of the primary bulwarks against government tyranny.

They didn’t exactly mince words. “Representative government and trial by jury are the heart and lungs of liberty,” wrote John Adams. “Without them we have no fortification against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and clothed like swine and hogs.”

One wonders what animalistic metaphors Adams would conjure today if he could see the U.S. criminal justice system in motion: one in which about 97 percent of trials are resolved without juries, devoid of the sacrosanct lifeblood that keeps human liberty from death by suffocation. – READ MORE