Your Humble Blogger was musing about what to write about, this Independence Day, and did that self-serving blogger thing and looked at my own posts from past Independence Days. I was struck by something Gentle Reader Chris Cobb wrote in a comment to my entry of 4 July, 2003. I had meant to address his essay as a whole at some point, and I don’t think I ever did, but what caught my attention this time through was this sentence:
Let democracy be understood to be a means to self-government, which is both the real prerequisite for liberty and the responsibility the accompanies liberty.This connected in my mind to a Whitman line I didn’t find for another two years about politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses. I think this idea of self-government (as an ideal, you understand, as a goal toward which to strive rather than an endpoint to be either reached or rejected) is one we could, nationally, bring back this Independence Day. You will, if you are the sort of person who peruses Left Blogovia for this sort of thing, undoubtedly come across today a variety of references to tyranny, possibly to “obstruct[ing] the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers”, possibly to “erect[ing] a multitude of New Offices, and sen[ding] hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance”, possibly to “render[ing] the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power”, possibly to “depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”, possibly to “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”, and possibly even to “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”. And all that is good, the right and proper job of Left Blogovia on such a day as this in such a time as this.
But what worries me, in the long term, is this question of self-government, of something more than superficial suffrage. At the moment, there’s a big discussion in this nation about whether the New York Times was right to publicize certain actions of the government, and tucked away in the conversation about what was actually dangerous, what was legal, and what was responsible was the assumption that the questions were all very far away, involving a large corporation and a government, working out what we should know. There was hardly any sense that we wanted to read this stuff, that we want to keep an eye on our own government, who is us. In part because this particular administration is not us, at least not in any sense I recognize. But I think that more fundamentally what’s missing is a sense of our own responsibility and our own liberty, and our own fulfillment of the dream of the Founding Fathers, who made a democratic republic to structure the government, but who wanted to make a democracy—not as a government, but as a people.
Well, within their own understanding of what that meant, and of course many of them wanted no such thing. But the point is that even if it’s a myth, this democracy, it’s a good myth, and an aspiration we don’t need to give up on. And as we celebrate ourselves, and sing ourselves, this Fourth of July, Two Thousand and Six, let’s celebrate what we are not yet, as well as what we have been, and become, a little more each generation, the people worthy of that most glorious of honorifics: democrat.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Thank you for this post. As the holiday approached I thought about various ways to celebrate it (seeing the new Superman movie turned out to be an ok way), and I was sure that I’d hear about some actual meaning of the day in your blog. That thought was a relief from pressing mundanity, as was the reality of finding and reading your actual post.
depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
I thought I might share here some personal experience with this, since some readers might believe that trial by jury is still alive and well. After all, many of us have been on juries, or at least been called for jury duty, and we hear about jury trials in the news…
I have always been a strong proponent of jury trials as a way of incorporating a tiny chance of balance and reason into a very slanted justice system. While I was awaiting trial for almost 15 months, pushing as hard as I possibly could to get to trial, I knew beyond any doubt that I wanted a jury trial rather than a bench trial (which is a trial where the judge also acts as the jury).
During dozens of hours sitting in courtrooms over those 15 months, I watched hundreds of people be bullied into waiving their right to a jury trial, bullied into waiving their right to a trial at all, and often bullied into waiving their right to counsel at all. I knew that would not be me. I wanted a trial with a jury of 12 of my fellow citizens rendering judgment.
Despite being charged with a felony, my only options were a jury of 6 people or no jury at all. And after almost 15 months, after endless delays and stalling by the prosecution, after a previous trial date that was cancelled by the prosecutor when she was told by the judge that she had no case, after my family and friends had traveled and taken unpaid time off from work twice already, I was offered a choice of either a trial with no jury or another postponement of months. At some point the bullying works.
Could I have persisted and eventually gotten a trial by jury? Perhaps, but only at guaranteed tremendous cost: costing my friends and family yet more court dates, delaying the trial by months, prolonging the substantial personal jeopardy involved in being out on bail, additional legal expenses, and all for a hope of a trial by jury at an unknown future date.
Do jury trials still exist? Sure, for a truly miniscule percentage of cases. But don’t imagine that the more than 99% of defendants who don’t get a jury trial made informed or free decisions to waive the jury trial. We may pretend defendants have a right to a trial by jury, but pretending doesn’t make it so.