Of One's Peers, By One's Peers, For One's Peers

If the right to representative government and trial by jury are, according to John Adams, the "heart and lungs of liberty," then the U.K., and possibly soon the U.S., are desperately in need of cardiopulmonary intervention. Our schism-scarred nation will fall apart all together, if Prime Minister Keir Starmer's spectacularly anti-democratic, cabal-emboldened plot takes hold here.

Our Bill of Rights has always been under assault. Even holders of diametrically opposed opinions about when those rights apply or are being violated, agree by acclamation that they are sacred.

Or at least elemental to our survival as a comparatively free nation.

But it appears that England, the inspiration and model of much of our own legal system,  (which is the supposed guarantor of our freedom), will soon abandon the jury system, which has been the bedrock since the 1200s, in cases where imprisonment for convicted defendants would not exceed three years. 

This mind-blowing scheme has outraged most of the qualified legal community. Why do they want to renounce the practice of defendants being judged by their peers? 

The answer is a mammoth ruse: to expedite a backlog of cases. And as we have seen in proposals to decimate public education and elsewhere, it will all be done in the name of "reform" and "efficiency."

A decrease in jury trials will guarantee an increase of wrongful convictions.

The backlog is reportedly around 80,000 cases, which means some already accused defendants may not get their cases resolved until 2030. If judges were to unilaterally decree verdicts in all the cases presently awaiting the docket in England, the time savings would still be negligible.

If the trials were 20 percent faster,  it would reduce only two percent of court time.

The Labor government under Starmer has already established a pattern of eviscerating the body of free speech and other rights of its citizens. Sometimes it has been in the guise of needing to keep the peace, by codifying preemptive cultural sensitivity. 

We must protect the rights of all who live in the States, by conscientiously not following suit.

Our own judicial system already resembles the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, but its Alice in Wonderland effect is more nihilistic than whimsical. Our republic is falling down the rabbit hole into the ideological netherworld of revisionism and reinvention.

The solid Constitution, its conventions and its amendments are liquefying. Everything is up for grabs, including citizenship and the federal electoral process.

The unthinkable has become the feasible. Cornerstones have become chess pieces for partisan wrangling and compromise.

Democracy has no more touchstones. It has only third rails.

In England, trial by jury has been the soul of common law for almost 900 years. Heck, Gilbert and Sullivan even wrote an operetta called Trial by Jury. Now the "mother country" is like a speeding vehicle from which the Magna Carta can barely be seen in its rearview mirror.

The U.S. is in the fast lane and owns the superhighway to freedom's retreat. Why are such liberties being taken with our liberties?

Why are judges, legislative bodies and elected officials on every level of government, abrogating, defying, and mocking their loyalty oaths to our nation's principles Rationalizations, these days, are an infinitely renewable resource.

Democracy is a naked mannequin draped with ideological fashions picked by political parties and movements who are the wardrobe masters.

Freedom is more a buzzword than a chromosome. It's not inherited whole by posterity.

It takes just one betrayal of the people by an errant, government led by bipartisan conspirators put into power by gullible people who trusted them or had no alternative.

Trial by jury is a bulwark of democracy.

Everyone, especially those who have endured jury duty, knows how massively flawed the system is. But it's a question of mathematical probability.

A jury of twelve is more likely to result in a fair outcome after deliberations, even allowing for prejudice and ignorance, than is a single judge.

Particularly during the present era when judges often achieve their positions for reasons other than brilliant and objective analytical skills.

Jury trials are the lesser of two done deals. Opposing bigotries at least have a chance to cancel each other out with juries. 

Conservatives and progressives both denounce and accuse each other of weaponizing the rule of law to suit their political philosophies and advance their agendas. The purity of truth succumbs to subordination.

There are dozens of egregious examples in the news lately.

The mayor, governor and president all appoint judges: is that not terrifying? When ideological overtones could be surmised from an alleged crime, a goat in the jaws of a Komodo dragon has a better chance of escaping the worst case scenario than would an innocent defendant whose fate would be determined solely by a judge who was a political appointee and held views sharply opposed to him.

A 6-year-old kid was recently disciplined by the leader of her elementary school in California for the offense of writing "any life" on a " Black Lives Matter" picture that she had given in friendship to a Black classmate, whose mother emailed her complaint to the school. The school placated her and punished the well-intentioned kid, whose mom sued the school for violating her child's First Amendment rights. 

No such rights applied to this case, ruled the partisan federal district court judge, based on extra-judicial sentiment. He was reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, but that was more lucky serendipity, than evidence that a flawed system is capable of self-correction.

Of course this is a minor, somewhat anomalous case, but it illustrates the same malady that guides many judges in nationally high-profile conflicts where legal scholarship takes a backseat to ideological affinity, as do the once respected principles of journalistic integrity that have been eroded by the despotism of single-mindedness.   

CNN and NewsMax, for instance, share this ignominy.

The same dangers that are embedded in the biases of judges and media extend to legislatures for the same reason: to make their viewpoint prevail. And worse, to render us incapable of recognizing evidence and forming independent thought.

In Virginia, schools have been forbidden by law to present more than one "description or portrayal" of the January 6, 2021 "insurrection" or the controversy surrounding the 2020 presidential election. It is illegal to teach that the event was not an insurrection.

No matter how factual it may seem, it is dangerous to stifle inquiry by forbidding alternate interpretations. When the government's version on these issues, or assassination conspiracies, UFO, medical research or anything else, is absolutist and inflexible, and rebels and mavericks are ignored or penalized by intellectual banishment, it is an insult to the freedom of inquiry.

What is dangerous is that students are being told exactly what they must believe, rather than how to think and reach a conclusion. It is the slimiest of slippery slopes.

Brendan Carr, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recently threatened to revoke the broadcasting licenses of stations that in his opinion were not acting in the public interest. He said, "The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation's airwaves."

He feels he is a one-person constabulary who is empowered to ensure compliance. He is specifically targeting broadcasters who are not cheering the war in Iran with sufficient patriotic vociferousness.

What is the "takeaway?"

That being judged by a "jury of one's peers," imperfect but better than matters of destiny being black-robed political patrons,  and expression, regardless how odious, must be held sacrosanct for the nation to survive.