Baker v. City of Fairbanks

CONNOR, Justice.

This case raises important questions about the right to jury trial for certain city ordinance violations. This necessarily means that we must reconsider the rationale of the opinion in Knudsen v. City of Anchorage, 358 P.2d 375 (Alaska 1960), which held that a person charged with a violation of a city ordinance prohibiting reckless driving was not entitled to a jury trial. Since Knudsen was decided, the United States Supreme Court in Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968), has made applicable to the states, through the Fourteenth Amendment due…