Comparative Reflections on Duncan v. Louisiana and Baldwin v. New York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article takes a look back at two of the major opinions of the criminal procedure revolution - Duncan v. Louisiana and Baldwin v. New York - and contends that, in retrospect, extending the right to jury trial to all felonies and misdemeanors was a mistake. Instead of protecting defendants from the power of the state, these decisions have had the opposite effect: criminal trials are increasingly rare and those defendants who dare to insist on their rights pay a substantial and sometimes brutal price if convicted. The article makes its case comparatively by taking a look at two other common law countries - England and Canada. Each has two trial courts and two trial models for most felonies and all misdemeanors. The two models are distinguished in such a way that it is usually to the strong advantage of both prosecutors and defendants to opt for the simpler nonjury trial model if possible. Prosecutors get a much shorter trial and defendants are assured a rather lenient sentence if they are convicted. This contrasts sharply with the United States where only one trial model is available and it is strongly to the prosecutor’s advantage to charge as high as ethically possible for plea-bargaining leverage. We often lament “the vanishing trial” in the United States. But Canada and England show there are options we could take to make more trials available for defendants without requiring additional resources. But, first, we must begin by reconsidering the wisdom of what the Court did in Duncan and Baldwin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".