D.C. Laws Strip Thousands of Criminal Defendants of Their Right to a Jury Trial. One D.C. Judge Has Suggested That Should Change.
Last June, wrestling with one of the stranger aspects of D.C.’s criminal justice system, one of the city’s most powerful judges made an unusual move: He suggested that the D.C. Council perhaps made the wrong call. His concern was that in the vast majority of states, anyone who’s facing jail time has the right to a jury trial, in order to ensure that all convictions are as fair as possible. But thanks to a pair of largely forgotten laws the Council passed in the 1990s, most defendants in the District don’t have any right to be tried by a jury. In 2018, more than 98 percent of misdemeanor trials in the District were bench trials, meaning a judge made the decision and no jury was involved.
In his concurring opinion in the June 2018 D.C. Court of Appeals decision Bado v. U.S., Bill Clinton-appointed Judge Eric Washington bemoaned this state of affairs. Going to jail for even a few months, he explained, can be life-shattering. People lose their jobs. They lose their apartments. They lose custody of their children. A criminal record can make future employers turn their noses up, and if someone’s already on probation, one “short” sentence generally translates into a second, longer one. “Most states recognize that a jury trial in criminal cases is critically important because of the stigma that accompanies a criminal conviction,” Washington wrote, “and many of those states accept the fact that any period of incarceration, no matter how short, can have a devastating impact on one’s life and livelihood.”