On Feb 25, 9:49 am, s...@panix.com (Seth Breidbart) wrote:
> Specifically, Article 23 of the Maryland Declaration of Rights, once
> known as Article 15, Section 5, provides that: In the trial of all
> criminal cases, the Jury shall be the Judges of Law, as well as of
> fact, except that the Court may pass upon the sufficiency of the
> evidence to sustain a conviction.
>
> During the first 100 years of its existence the provision simply
> read: In the trial of all criminal cases, the jury shall be the
> judges of law as well as fact.
That's what the MDR _says_, but that clause is no longer good law, because it has been found unconstitutional, just a couple of months ago. On December 5, 2006, the MD Court of Special Appeals upheld a trial court ruling granting a new trial to a man, Raymond Leon Adams, who was convicted in 1979 of rape and was serving a life sentence. The basis for Adams' appeal was that the original trial judge (in 1979) had repeatedly told the jury, in accord with the MDR, that any instructions he gave them on the facts or the law were purely advisory, and that the jury was free to disregard anything he said. The CSA in 2006 held that "instructing the jury that the law as presented to it is binding is essential to the guarantee that no criminal conviction be obtained other than by the rule of law."
CSA based its 2006 _Adams_ ruling on a 2000 case from the US 4th Circuit, _Jenkins_v_Hutchinson_, which held that an advisory "reasonable doubt" instruction given pursuant to the MDR violated the defendant's Federal constitutional right to due process, applying their ruling retroactively and overturning Jenkins' conviction, even though such an instruction was permitted at the time of Jenkins' conviction by State law.
The _Jenkins_ court, in turn, based its reasoning on _In_Re_Winship_, a 1970 SCOTUS case which had held that any provision of law relieving the prosecution of its burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a criminal trial is unconstitutional under the 5th Amendment due process clause. Yet, MD judges continued to give such instructions throughout the next 3 decades, since no MD or Federal decision until _Jenkins_ in 2000 had ever ruled upon the constitutionality of this clause of the MDR.
IMO the _Adams_ ruling goes beyond the bare minimum required by _Winship_ and _Jenkins_ to comply with the US constitution, and holds that ANY statement by the judge to a jury that ANY of his instructions on the law are merely "advisory" is now forbidden. It is not enough for MDR merely to ensure that the judge can act as a check on the sufficiency of the evidence, because the jury, not the judge, is the one who has to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the defendant's guilt. A jury that returns a conviction on a lesser standard will only be overturned on sufficiency-of-evidence grounds if the judge finds, as a matter of law, that the prosecution's evidence was not even barely enough to present the issue to the jury. Of course, in most cases a "bare bones" prima facie case by the prosecution, that barely meets the sufficiency-of-evidence test, is not going to have much "weight" with a jury, and is unlikely to convince the jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; but if the judge tells the jury that his instructions are merely "advisory", many such cases would be likely to result in conviction even though the jury _had_ some reasonable doubt.
None of this changes the law that a jury's verdict of ACQUITTAL cannot be challenged by the state on appeal, without unconstitutionally violating the Double Jeopardy clause. (The State CAN appeal an acquittal if it was based on an error of _law_ committed by the trial judge, but cannot challenge the jury's factual finding of guilty or not guilty if there was no error in the judge's legal instructions or in his decisions to admit or exclude some of the evidence).
So, as a practical matter, a jury is still free to acquit just because they don't like the substantive law under which a defendant was charged. But no one is constitutionally permitted to TELL them that. The jury swears an oath to follow the law as instructed by the judge, and that is what they are supposed to do.
--
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Mike Jacobs
LAW OFFICE OF W. MICHAEL JACOBS
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