Secret juries reverse liberty

Hooded tribunals? Nameless, nonaccountable jurors?

No, we’re not talking about “justice” in some Third World autocracy.

We’re talking about a possible future right here in Virginia.

In a radical reversal of justice standards in the commonwealth — not to mention the rest of the nation’s 50 states — it has been proposed that Virginia automatically make all juries anonymous in criminal trials.

Just like that, Virginia proposes to reverse centuries-old legal standards.

The right of a defendant to face his accusers and to be tried by a jury of his peers is written into the Ameri-can Constitution. The precedent for open juries dates to a similar time and a similar cause.

The Founding Fathers feared the danger of “Star Chamber” proceedings in which defendants were tried and convicted, often for political reasons, without being made aware of the identity of their accusers or the evidence against them.

The Bill of Rights as a result sets standards for open courts and the right of the defendant to be heard by a jury of his peers. The Sixth Amend-ment does not directly addresss the need for open juries, but the standard is implicit in the specificiations for peer juries and general requirements for transparency.

Now comes the Advisory Commit-tee on the Rules of Court for the Supreme Court of Virginia to turn that standard on its head. Jurors would be known only by numbers, not by identities.

Instead of open juries being the norm, legislation would flip that standard and require that secret juries be the norm in criminal cases.

Is this still America? Is this still the Virginia that gave us the drafter of the Declaration of Independence, the Father of the Constitution, the first president of the liberty-loving republic?

We understand the impetus for the proposal. Advocates fear jury tampering or outright physical threats to jurors.

But the proposal doesn’t address those occasional individual cases where threats of interference or danger might actually exist.

It says that all criminal juries will be secret. A jury could be opened only if one side or the other fought to have it so.

On the surface, the proposal may seem innocuous, even justified. However, it is difficult to overestimate the damage it could do.

This changes everything.

The standard of openness that the Founding Fathers established is under attack, viewed as expendable. If this proposal is accepted, what piece of open government would next become vulnerable?

We can’t let it happen. Not in Virginia. Not anywhere.