I did once discover that in at least one jurisdiction criminal charges were not guaranteed a jury trial, only a bench trial was given. The judge in that circumstance is the prosecutor from another nearby jurisdiction.
I did once discover that in at least one jurisdiction criminal charges were not guaranteed a jury trial, only a bench trial was given. The judge in that circumstance is the prosecutor from another nearby jurisdiction.
I ran into the buzzsaw of Amazon's KDP self-publishing fraud detection bots, which decided that my Kindle was plagiarizing my paperback (duh, it's the same book). I went through a series of Kafkaesque email appeals — all denied with progressively vaguer justifications. By the final appeal, there was literally no concrete point left to even argue against, just vague wording about creating a negative experience for readers.
I'm not sure a human ever looked at my case. Or if they did, they had a huge incentive to just rubber-stamp the bot's decision and move on. The whole experience was soul-crushing, and I didn't even have that much at stake compared to some. I hope the architects and implementers of this system run into something similar someday so they know how it feels. The only recourse I've ever seen work is to tweet or create a blog post and have it go viral.
That's not a valid excuse for "due process" being completely unfair and placing unreasonable burdens on the accused.
What? In the US? Where?
TL;DR the Sixth's right to jury trial doesn't apply for criminal charges carrying less than sixth months maximum sentence—even if there are multiple such charges that may add up to more than that.
Gonna go out on a limb and guess that plenty of US jurisdictions don't voluntarily pay extra money to make those jury trials if they aren't forced to.