The Jury’s Right to Know the Sentence
Simple Justice: Via Doug Berman, the amici brief in United States v. Polizzi is a remarkable piece of work. This is the case where Eastern District of New York Judge Jack Weinstein, after receiving a guilty verdict in a kiddie porn case, decided that he had erred by his failure to inform the jury that their verdict would require him to impose a mandatory minimum prison sentence,
As discussed here, Judge Weinstein concluded that denial of this information to the jury, the buffer between the government and the individual, impaired the defendant’s rights under the 6th Amendment.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Families Against Mandatory Minimums, were granted leave to appear amici curiae, with the brief prepared by Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. The meat of the brief is a very well developed and documented argument that the right to a jury, as understood and demanded by our forefathers, particularly the anti-federalists who insisted on inclusion of the Bill of Rights, that was fully aware of the penal consequences of their verdict.
As this colonial practice and understanding make clear, the right to a jury trial embodied in the Sixth Amendment assumes, as an essential characteristic, that the jury would possess all accurate available information about crimes and punishments that will aid its decision-making. See, e.g., United States v. Glick, 463 F.2d 491, 492, 494 (2d Cir. 1972) (judges must correct possible juror misimpressions of sentencing rules; conviction vacated where court answered “yes” to the jury’s query, “[c]an the jury in its verdict recommend leniency?”). Such information is critical if “an open and public discussion of all causes” submitted to the jury for verdict is to occur.
The brief spans a broad array of colonial sources to show that juries then, as opposed to now, realized the practical consequences of…