Owens v. State

HARRELL, Judge.

Trial by jury is lauded as “the very palladium of free government,”1 and a “sacred bulwark of the nation.”2 Thomas Jefferson lauded “trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” 3 Writings of Thomas Jefferson 71 (Washington ed., 1861). Encroachment on this institution by the expanding jurisdiction of the English vice-admiralty courts, the trials of which were conducted without juries,3 was chief among the complaints registered by American colonists in the Declaration of Independence.4 There…